ONG H U4 FINE CHINESE DINING twite,s, Tow %, 'A wonderful adventure in fine dining" within a millimeter of his spine. His war is over. But Kippur is more than a combat movie, and the title itself conveys dif- ferent layers of meaning. Most com- monly, kippur means "atonement," as in the Day of Atonement that gave the war its name. The root word also alludes to the casting of lots, as in the Jewish holiday of Purim, and stands for the unpre- dictable chances of life and death in war. The word also connotes reconcili- ation, says Gitai. Despite headlines reporting daily vio- lence between Israelis and Palestinians, Gitai still can trace a psychological thread from confrontation to peace. "The overwhelming feeling when you're in war is not hatred, bravery or even fear, but utter fatigue," he says. "In this film, its not only physical fatigue, because you're running and carrying people, but also emotional fatigue because you see such terrible things. That's at the heart of my war experience. "Wars come to an end not because of the wisdom of statesmen, but because everybody just feels wiped out. When enough people have died, they see the waste of it, they stretch out their arms and say, 'Let's do some- thing else with our lives."' That, says the director, is the deep- est meaning of Kippur, and in it lies the ultimate hope for peace in the Middle East. "The final peace agreement, when it comes, will be hailed as a triumph of diplomacy, but it will have been dic- tated by fatigue," Gitai says. "We are doomed to have peace." Gitai is a stocky man with curly black hair, whose youthful looks belie his 50 years and harrowing war experiences. His father was an architect of the Bauhaus school, one of the Nazis' first targets in 1933, and Amos planned a similar career. After earning a doctor- ate in architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, however, he gravitated toward filmmaking. His academic background, he believes, helps him to impose a certain structure and shape on diverse, often contradictory, material. He started his cinematic career in 1980 with a trilogy — a format he still favors — for Israeli television. He ran into trouble almost immediately. In the three documentaries — House, Wadi ("Valley") and Field Diary — "I tried to show that Palestinians have the same attachment to the land as Israelis," Gitai says. Israeli television executives refused to air the films, according to Gitai. Field Diary, which finally was broad- cast two years ago, is the only one the Israeli public has seen so far. After his first three documentaries were censored, Gitai lived for seven years in self-imposed exile in Paris. Not once did he consider making a movie on the Yom Kippur War. "I had nightmares," admits Gitai. "I wasn't ready to make a film about my experience." The change came in 1993, when the homesick director moved back to Israel to find Yitzhak Rabin negotiat- ing peace. The time seemed right for Gitai's kind of war movie. "I had seen a lot of films that anes- thetized war, but I' didn't want pretty -explosions," he says. "I wanted to con- vey the exhaustion." Gitai's filmography now runs to 27 feature films and documentaries, and his most recent trilogy has met with the usual controversy. Each film in the trilogy seeks to portray the character of one of Israel's three main cities: Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The Jerusalem segment, which pre- miered in 1999, is titled Kadosh (Holy), and is set within the city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim quarter. It depicts the rebellion of an Orthodox wife against a stifling, hermetic society. Kadosh was bitterly criticized by many Orthodox Jews for showing what they claimed was a twisted pic- ture of their lifestyle, but it became the first Israeli entry in 24 years at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. Kippur required a lot of military hardware, cost $4.5 million and is Gitai's most expensive picture to date. It screened in May 2000 at the Cannes competition and, according to Gitai, some 3,000 members of the audience applauded as the credits rolled — and then remained silent in their seats for a full five minutes. In a highly unusual step, the noted Egyptian director Yussef Shahine praised the film in his country's press. "I have talked to Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian filmmakers," Gitai says. "It's not easy for them, but I have found some with similar attitudes" to mine, people "who want to move away from their regimes' simplistic propa- ganda positions. "When the time comes for a real peace agreement, it can't be just a piece of paper. There must be, at the same time, a cultural dialogue." ❑ Kippur will be shown 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 29, at the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. $6. (313) 833-3237. 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