My education was in architecture, because my father was an architect and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I only became a filmmaker because of the Yom Kippur War.

It should be apparent why Amos Gitai well deserves a place at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The great Israeli filmmaker has been, since decades, part of the most open and progressive wing of his country’s intelligentsia. For the Biennale, he created House, a piece that is at once a theatre show that toured all over Europe and an installation at the heart of the Biennale. The theme is the one we can all imagine, the one that shapes every day the lives of the Israelis and the Palestinians. House is, in fact, a series of multimedia installations that feed a vibrant, fertile contamination of languages, musical traditions, generations, and ethnicities that can reveal and render the complex memories of the past and imagine practical way to live together—in the future, that is, because as things stand, there is little going on in terms of togetherness. The eponymous house stands in West Jerusalem. Once belonging to a Palestinian, after the war of 1948 the Israeli government will assign it to Jewish refugees from Algeria. The house will grow to be a symbolic place of meeting and conflict between two peoples.

Featured image: Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia