As the first of two screenings, the Stanford University Libraries are pleased to host Amos Gitai's groundbreaking film House (1980) on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in Hauck Auditorium, Traitel Building. There will be a reception and a panel discussion to follow the screening. 

Panelists

• Amos Gitai, filmmaker and artist
• Jennifer Wolch, Distinguished Professor Emerita, City & Regional Planning and Dean Emerita, College of Environment Design, UC Berkeley
• Richard Peña, Emeritus Professor, Film and Media Studies, Columbia University and Emeritus Director, New York Film Festiva
• Vered Shemtov, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Stanford University

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required to attend.

The second film screening in the Amos Gitai Film Festival will feature the "powerful, political, and provocative," Rabin, The Last Day (2015) on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 in the Hauck Auditorium, Traitel Building. More details on the event and registration.

Film Synopsis

House

Gitai's first film, House (1980), is about a house in West Jerusalem that belonged to a Palestinian family until 1948. The film traces the succession of its owners and residents.

During the 1948 war, the Dajani family left their home, and the Israeli government housed Algerian Jewish immigrants, the Toboul family, there. At the end of the 70’s a renowned Israeli economist bought the house and the Tobouls were relocated to public housing, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Now, the new owner wants to transform this house into a three-story villa. To do so, he has to bring stones from a quarry south of the West Bank, and Palestinian workers from refugee camps around Hebron.

This house is therefore the subject of this documentary, which offers a series of biographical fragments. It’s a kind of microcosm, a metaphor for Jerusalem, with its human archaeological layers.

About the Filmmaker

AMOS GITAI is an artist and filmmaker. He was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1950 to Munio Weinraub, an architect trained at the Bauhaus, and Efratia Margalit, an intellectual and teacher. He holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

Internationally known for his documentaries and feature films about the Middle East, the Arab Israeli conflict, and personal and collective memory, Gitai was wounded during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when a medical evacuation helicopter in which he was travelling was hit by a Syrian missile. He has drawn on biographical, familial and generational themes throughout his career, as well as the trauma of war and the celebration of life in the face of adversity.

To date, Gitai has created over ninety films, spanning a wide variety of formats including feature-length and short films, fiction and documentaries, experimental works, television productions, and also installations or theater plays. His work has been presented in several major retrospectives around the world.

The Amos Gitai Archive at Stanford

For the past nine years, Stanford University Libraries has been steadily collecting the archives of Amos Gitai’s work, both documentary and fiction, including the House documentary trilogy: House (1980), A House in Jerusalem (1998), News from Home / News from House (2005); the border trilogy: Promised Land (Terre promise) (2004), Free Zone (2005), Disengagement (2007); and two films centered on the Holocaust : One Day You’ll Understand (Plus tard tu comprendras) (2008) and Tsili (2014), both adaptations of literary works. More recently, the collection was expanded to include Gitai’s theater adaptation of the House trilogy.

Spanning more than forty years of work and representing ten and a half terabytes of data, this collection offers exceptional access to the creative process of a world-renowned artist—one who feels at home in the fields of cinema, architecture, theater, and art.

Amos Gitai Publications Available for Purchase

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to publish two books in conjunction with this event. 

• Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination by Amos Gitai is available for purchase from Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
• Amos Gitai and the Challenge of Archives, edited by Amos Gitai and Jean-Michel Frodon, will be published in January 2026.

Both books will be available for purchase at the event. Together, these books introduce American audiences to Amos Gitai’s decades-spanning oeuvre grappling with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the place of the arts in engaging with that conflict.

Questions? Please contact akim6@stanford.edu