The second of two screenings, The Stanford University Libraries are pleased to host Amos Gitai's "powerful, political, and provocative," Rabin The Last Day (2015) on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 in the Hauck Auditorium, Traitel Building. There will be a reception and a conversation with filmmaker Amos Gitai following the screening. 

Panelists

• Amos Gitai, filmmaker and artist
• Robert Alter, Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley

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

See the first screening of the Amos Gitai Film Festival featuring the groundbreaking film House (1980) on Thursday, January 22, 2026 in Hauck Auditorium, Traitel Building. More details on the event and registration.

Film Synopsis

Rabin The Last Day

On the evening of Saturday, November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Nobel and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin is shot down with three bullets at the end of a huge rally for peace and against violence in the center of Tel Aviv. His killer, apprehended at the scene, turns out to be a twenty-five-year-old student and observant Jew.

This feature film shot twenty years after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination sheds light what made this tragic deed possible: A culture of hate fueled by hysterical rhetoric, paranoia, and political intrigue. The extremist rabbis who condemned Rabin by invoking an obscure religious ruling. The prominent rightwing politicians who joined in a campaign of incitement against Rabin. The militant Israeli settlers for whom peace meant betrayal. And the security agents who saw what was coming and failed to prevent it.

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.