Amos Gitai is an Israeli screenwriter, director and producer of feature and documentary films. He was born Amos Weinraub, but in the year of his birth, his family changed their German last name Weinraub to Gitai, which has the same meaning in Hebrew. In his youth he followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled in architecture school. However, his studies were interrupted by the war on Yom Kippur in 1973. He got drafted and, during helicopter missions he recorded the events (with a Super 8 camera he had received as a birthday present from his mother), which was his first experience with film. On his twenty-third birthday, his helicopter was shot down. He later depicted those events in his feature film Kippour (2000). After the war, he graduated with a degree in architecture from the Israeli Technion University in Haifa. Following that, he earned a doctorate at UC Berkeley in California. From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s he made many short films and documentaries, such as Bayit (1980) and Yoman Sadeh (1982), in which he questioned the coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians. Both films were rejected by Israeli television, but they were shown at festivals around the world. In 1983, Gitai moved to Paris, where he lived for the next decade, and also traveled around the world making documentaries covering a wide range of topics: from growing pineapples (Ananas, 1984) to musical documentaries Brand New Day (1988) in which he followed Annie Lennox and The Eurythmics during their tour in Japan. In 1986, he directed his first feature film, Esther, borrowing the story from the Old Testament and explaining the Jewish holiday Purim. His next film, Berlin-Yerushalaim (1989), won the Bastone Bianco film critics’ award at the Venice Film Festival. Then he made a trilogy inspired by the Jewish legend of the Golem: Naissance d'un Golem (1991), Golem, l'esprit de l'exil (1992) and Golem, le jardin pétrifié (1993). In 1993, he moved to Haifa and began the most productive period of his career, oriented toward feature films. He made a trilogy about Jewish cities: Zihron Devarim (1995 - Tel Aviv), Yom Yom (1998 - Haifa) and Kadosh (1999 - Jerusalem). In Eden (2001) and Kedma (2002), he dealt with the history of Israel and then returned to the present in his films Alila (2003), Promised Land (2004) and Free Zone (2005). He made the last two in international co-production, as well as his next film, Disengagement (2007), starring Juliette Binoche and Jeanne Moreau. He continued his collaboration with Moreau in Plus tard (2008), in which she has the leading role. His last film is Roses à crédit (2010), a French production made for television.