In the Amos Gitaï family, the taste for architecture is transmitted from father to son; The Israeli film producer and architect is in the habit of connecting the two disciplines, to such a point that the heroine of his first film, « House », in 1980, was indeed a house. In the film industry, one works on projects, like one does in architecture. Projects are « produced » to carry a political message and, in Gitaï’s case, a message of resistance. 

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui You often talk about architecture through your films or in your many conversations (also filmed) with architects. Why?

Amos Gitaï I watch the way in which architecture portrays transformations in society and how these create architecture. This is the subject of my film Lullaby to my Father (2011) and many others in which architecture and landscape are often the central characters. I studied architecture in Haifa and then Berkeley. I wanted to understand and be able to speak with my father, who passed away in 1970. He was involved in the Bauhaus [Munio Weinraub was a fellow student of Mies van der Rohe and architecture meant everything to him. I started producing films when I went to interview the architects Philip Johnson and Charles Eames. Today, I am a “film builder” and I find that the two activities have much in common; a way of doing things, a language, the ability to go from one discipline to another, to make use of the arts and their production, with which we can invent and not just recycle…

Read Amos Gitaï’s full interview in the Viewpoints section of AA issue 417.