Amos Gitai was born in 1950 in Haifa, Israel. The son of a Bauhaus-trained architect, Munio Weinraub, who fled Nazism in 1933, and an intellectual and teacher, Efratia Gitai, a non-religious biblical scholar born in Palestine in the early 20thcentury , he was part of the first generation born after the founding of the State of Israel, a generation also shaped by the great youth protest movements of the 1960s.
Gitai, who was still an architecture student, was injured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the medevac helicopter in which he was riding was hit by a Syrian missile. These biographical, familial and generational elements, together with the trauma of war and a sense of victorious life, would inspire all his future work.
After completing a doctorate in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Amos Gitai devoted his first film, House (1980), to the construction of a house in West Jerusalem. This documentary, which was immediately banned in Israel, had a lasting impact on the filmmaker's conflictual relationship with the Israeli authorities, a relationship that was soon exacerbated by the controversy surrounding his film Diary of the Country (1982). Gitai then moved to Paris and made several films, both fiction and documentary, including Esther (1986), Berlin-Jerusalem (1989) and Golem l'esprit de l'exil (1991).
Amos Gitai returned to Israel in 1993, the year in which Yitzhak Rabin signed the peace accords in Washington. His trilogy of cities includes Devarim, shot in Tel Aviv (1995), Yom Yom in Haifa (1998) and Kadosh in Jerusalem (1999). Four of his films were presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival(Kadosh, Kippur, Kedma, Free Zone), and six others at the Venice Film Festival(Berlin-Jerusalem, Eden, Alila, Promised Land, Ana Arabia, The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin).