Green Cine recently asked me to interview Israeili film director Amos Gitai for their rather formidable website, and I agreed for three reasons: 1) I enjoy talking to famous directors I've never met, 2) I'm interested in films about the Middle East, and 3) When I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore was rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival in 1995, I was told by one of the programmers that is was between my film and Amos Gitai's and that they had finally decided to accept his film rather than mine, not because they liked his film better (they claimed to prefer mine) but because they believed it would sell more tickets. Having been told this, I've felt a personal connection to the guy ever since.
I had only seen one other Gitai film before, a very free-form documentary about the Israeli peace movement that I found fascinating, if a bit unstructured. But I had heard that he was a great guy, and I admired his pacifist views as well as his prolificness (he has made over 40 films).
Tonight, Mandy and I watched his 2005 Cannes entry, Free Zone, which starred Natalie Portman and Hana Laszlo (who won the best actress award at Cannes.) I found it alternately brilliant and inane, original and contrived, subtle and ham-fisted. But there was something about it that was somehow so profoundly symptomatic of the culture it was depicting, that even its flaws end up being a perfect expression of its worldview. And Hana Laszlo's performance really and truly is remarkable.
Amos Gitaiposted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:57 PM
