Israeli director Amos Gitai has rejected calls to boycott his new film Why the war and said that both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict must clean up their current leaderships for peace to prevail.
Previewed this weekend out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Why the war draws on the early 1930s correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the question of the warlike nature of the human race and how to avoid war. The work mixes reenactments of the two characters acting out their exchanges, with historical images of war in art and acted scenes of characters dealing with the psychological impact of conflict.
While the film has no direct connection to the current conflict in the Middle East, Gitai and Why the war have been the subject of protests in Venice. Around 300 filmmakers have signed an open letter opposing the film and the Hebrew-language drama by Dani Rosenberg Al Klavim Veanashim (Of dogs and men), calling for a boycott of both films. The artists, including several Palestinian filmmakers and actors, including Oscar nominees Hany Abu-Assad, Rosalind Nashashibi, Raed Andoni and Saleh Bakri, as well as directors Enrico Parenti and Alessandra Ferrini; and actors Niccolò Senni, Simona Cavallari and Paola Michelini, said Why the war was “created by complicit Israeli production companies that contribute to apartheid, occupation, and now genocide through their silence or active participation in artwashing.”
Gitai, who has long been an advocate for peace and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, rejected calls for a boycott, saying that the people who signed the open letter had not seen the film and that the production had not received any funding from the Israeli state.
Gitai observed that Why the war explores the issue of war in a general sense rather than through “the drunken Israeli-Palestinian relationship.”
“The film is not really about Israel and Palestine, even though they always like to think they are the center of the world,” Gitai said. “There is no center of the world. The planet is round. [It’s] a very important conflict, but it is not the only one on the planet,” he said.
He described the film, starring Irène Jacob, Mathieu Amalric, Micha Lescot, Jérôme Kircher, Yaël Abecassis, Keren Morr, as a poetic associative journey, made during shooting in Vienna, Tel Aviv, Berlin and Paris.
“It's all based on these two great thinkers. Karl Marx probably inspired Albert Einstein, because it's a very Marxist piece about money and greed, or industry. Freud talks about the human soul and why these intelligent animals want to make war.”
Despite the horror of the current situation in the Middle East, Gitai said he was optimistic that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will one day be resolved.
“We cannot be deterministic about history… Sometimes the lowest point will give way to reconciliation because these people will understand that this is not the right path to follow,” he said. “They cannot continue to kill each other and proclaim this victory. These are empty propositions.”
Gitai suggested that to have a chance at peace, both the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu must be wiped out.
“The two groups must understand that the proposal to be under Hamas is not a good proposal. There will be no rights for women, no rights for Eastern Christians, no rights for LGBT, nothing. The Iranians have already taken this path when they stood behind Khomeini and got stuck there,” he said.
“We Israelis need to get rid of the extremist, nationalist, right-wing, racist, ultra-religious government that we have. The two groups need to clean up their shit a little and then maybe a new bridge can be built. It doesn't exist now, but we need to keep the idea that one day it will come, and I think it will. What's the option?”
Gitai said he decided not to show any images related to the ongoing escalation of the more than 70-year-old conflict between Israel and Palestine because he believes the current media coverage from both sides is further inflaming the situation.
“If you watch Israeli TV, they will only show you the atrocities of October 7, the rape of women, the burning of kibbutzim. If I were a normal Israeli and I saw these images, I would say, 'Let's kill them all,'” he noted.[And] the Arab networks, Al Jazeera, will only show you the destruction of Gaza, so the savagery and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes in Gaza and the killing of tens and thousands of people… most of whom are not terrorists… civilians, children. Now there is polio, lack of food. [If I’m] a Palestinian and I only see these images, they will not see the Israeli images, [I would] say: “Let's continue the war.”
He added: “TV prolongs war. Iconography prolongs war, so we decided to make an anti-war film without images of war. We have to find new ways to rebuild this beautiful region… even despite the wounds, tragedies and bad memories, we have to build something different. This cannot continue.”