Stanford Libraries presents The Amos Gitai Archive at Stanford, on view in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda from November 17, 2025, to February 15, 2026. 

Amos Gitai’s strategy for his artistic legacy might be likened to the principle of "scatter in order to endure.” The way he has distributed traces of his films is a means of bringing to life, internationally, the memory of his filmography, the history of his young country, and universal themes about the fragility and degradation of memory. In this era of digital archives, Gitai decided early on to place his work at well-known international institutions, among them Stanford and the National Library of France. The Gitai archive at Stanford is characterized by its historical depth, featuring eight films spanning the years 1980 to 2014, as well as multimedia works from the 2020s. It contains 10.5 terabytes of photographs, screenplays, scripts, letters, and shooting reports. Also included are rushes, early cuts, subtitles, scores, and post-production documents revealing traces of the artistic process. 

The House trilogy (1980, 1998, 2005) revolves around a house in West Jerusalem—its successive inhabitants, their descendants, and the people who worked on it. It brings the memory this house bears to the eyes and ears of old and new generations, those who have stayed and those who have scattered, from the new arrivals from Turkey to the descendants of the Palestinian family now settled in Jordan, zooming out from a close-up of the house to encompass the entire geopolitical fate of the region. Whereas the House trilogy has historical depth and spans several generations, the Borders trilogy—comprising Promised Land (2004), Free Zone (2005), and Disengagement (2007)—was created over a shorter timeframe. These two trilogies, one documentary and one fiction, enter into a type of resonance. News from Home / News from House and Free Zone were shot simultaneously in 2004 and share images, cover the same geography and history, and both deal with porous memory and its gradual disintegration. The Gitai archive at Stanford also contains the archives of the films Plus Tard Tu Comprendes (One Day You’ll Understand) (2008) and Tsili (2014). Both are adaptations of literary works by contemporary authors. Both raise questions about the transmission of Holocaust memory in a European context, as well as cinematographic and ethical questions about how to film the words of others. 

Gitai’s work on the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, part of his archives at the National Library of France, showcased in a forthcoming book published by Stanford University Libraries, could be described as a series of palimpsests, an endless process of revision and editing to understand precisely what happened and what was lost with Rabin’s assassination. And it is also an aesthetic journey, like House, a decades-long exploration of broad histories told through focus on a single figure. With this exhibition, we invite you to explore Gitai’s archive at Stanford and beyond.

This exhibition is curated by Ayda Melika and Eitan Kensky with texts by Marie-José Sanselme and Marie-Pierre Ulloa; produced by Deardra Fuzzell, with assistance from Elizabeth Fischbach and Pasha Tope.