Field Diary

Yoman Sadeh

France, Israel

1982

83 Min

Color

Hebrew

Currently 2.9/5 Stars.
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DIR Amos Gitai

New York

Synopsis

In 1982, Amos Gitai took a small camera crew to the West Bank and started filming the day-to-day business of the Israeli occupation. The result was a landmark in Israeli cinema; Gitai has spoken about the film as portraying the end of the “myth of the good occupation”—the belief that, in the territories captured after the 1967 War, Israel would be a very different kind of occupying power; 15 years later, Gitai’s film shows the occupation in a very different light. Field Diary also introduced what would become Gitai’s signature style: the long, lateral tracking shots that, as Yann Lardeau noted in Cahiers du cinéma, “become a question of morality…we never enter into the reality of the war, but we always remain on the edge of the scene.” –NYFF

Director

Amos Gitai

Born in Haifa in 1950, as the second son of architect Munio Weinraub and former Sionist activist Efratia Margalit. On the year of his birth, his parents changed the family name to “Gitai”, which is the Hebrew translation of the German name “Weinraub”. While he was a student in architecture, Amos Gitai joined the Yom Kippur war in 1973 as a reserve duty officer, and served as part of a helicopter rescue team. While serving during the war, he started filming with a 8mm camera his mother gave him as his birthday present. On his 23rd birthday, October 11th 1973, his helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile. Among the 7 crews on board, 6 of them survived, including Gitai himself, who was inspired by this traumatic experience to quit architecture and move to filmmaking. He made a documentary on this incident and his fellow survivors, “Kippur: War Memories” in 1993, then a fictional recreation of it “Kippur” in 2000.

in 1979, Gitai directed his first feature-length documentary “House”… read more