AGAV Films

The film intertwines historical events and intimate memories. I observe how architecture represents the transformations of society and those who give form to this architecture. We follow the journey of Munio, my father, born in 1909 in Silesia, Poland, the son of a tenant farmer of a Prussian junker. At the age of 18, Munio goes to Berlin and Dessau to meet Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus. In 1933, the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, who accused Munio of treason against the German people. Munio was imprisoned, then deported to Basel. He left for Palestine. Upon his arrival in Haifa, he began a career as an architect and adapted European modernist principles to the Middle East.

Itzhak Rabin's murder ended all efforts of peace, and with him the whole left wing of Israel died. The movie shows the last of his days as prime minister, and what led to his murder.

A political drama centered around Israel's pullout from the occupied Gaza strip, in which a French woman of Israeli origin comes to the Gaza Strip to find her long ago abandoned daughter.

A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.

Japan, 1986. At the tail end of the world tour promoting their latest album Revenge, Eurythmics tops the charts. Between concerts, pop duo Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart survey Japan's cultural soundscape with the help of Conny Plank: A world of sounds both brutally technological and highly refined by tradition.

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï offers a look impressionist long history of armed conflict in their nation.

Two interconnected stories in the 1930s, one set in Berlin, the other in Palestine: Mania Vilbouchevich Shohat (1880-1961), called Tania, a Russian Jew and revolutionary, goes from Minsk to Palestine to live on a collective. She promotes feminism and laments a shift in the men from self-defense to aggression. Her friend, Else Lasker-Schuler (1869 - 1945), expressionist poet and German Jew, is in Berlin, writing, caring for her son, watching Hitler's movement take power. She goes to Jerusalem and imagines a park for Arab and Jew. Her poems, voiced from within, capture her experience. The film meditates on the violence at the root of Israel's birth: of the Nazis and of the Zionists.

Gitai pays homage to Albert Camus and explores the return to Palestinian villages while interjecting texts by Izhar Smilansky, Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish, and Amira Hass.

Ahasverus, king of Persia and Media, puts aside Vashti and makes Esther his queen, choosing her among maidens in a kingdom stretching from India to Ethiopia. Esther, using information from Mordecai, her uncle and patron, saves the king from assassination. Haman, the king's favorite, is miffed when Mordecai won't bow to him, so he orders death to all Jews in the kingdom, under the seal of the king. Esther pleads for her people, and Mordecai is in turn given license to make his own edict under the king's seal. Mordecai loses sight of his original intention, and bloody murder ensues. Purim annually celebrates the story. At the end of the film, the actors comment.

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.

Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.

Tsili is a young girl caught in the middle of World War II. After her family is taken to a concentration camp, Tsili hides in the forest, free from hatred and men, until the arrival of Marek, a stranger who speaks to her in Yiddish.

A diverse cross-section of Israeli society converges in a single multi-use building, the Shikun. As people of different languages, origins and generations come together in highly theatrical encounters, they grapple with the current state of affairs. In a poignant metaphor inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s famous play “Rhinoceros”, some begin to turn into rhinoceroses, while others resist.

In this film, the itinerary of Flavius Josephus at the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70 crosses that of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, and the memory of the Holocaust through images of Poland. Milim reflects Amos Gitai's views on the history of the Jewish people and Israeli society in the wake of Rabin's assassination.