‘The Enemies are Elsewhere’ Amos Gitai in conversation with Katja Nicodemus ahead of the Berlinale

Peace in the Middle East is possible, despite everything. This is what the renowned Israeli director and former soldier Amos Gitai says. An encounter before the Berlinale, where his film "Shikun" will premiere. 

On the phone, Amos Gitai told me that he closely escaped death. A few days later, we meet in his Paris flat on the second floor of a former factory building. His wife Rivka opens the door. The Israeli director is sitting in an armchair in a high-ceilinged living area, apologising for not getting up to greet us. There is a blanket over his knees.

Amos Gitai was admitted to hospital in Tel Aviv on 1 January. "The gastric rupture was my New Year's present to myself," he says. The doctors spoke of a psychosomatic reaction. After the Hamas terror attack, he, like so many others, had hardly been able to sleep for weeks.

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Gitai captured scenes of the war with a Super 8 camera that his mother had gifted him. And he painted self-portraits, paintings and drawings like a madman. In the works, his face appears distorted, cubistically displaced, broken down into individual parts, as if he had to relive the moment when everything was torn apart over and over again (in March, these works will be shown in the exhibition War Requiem in Salzburg at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery).