Born in Haifa in 1950, with forty mid-length and feature films to his credit, Amos Gitai first made his name as a documentary director. A member of the official jury at Locarno in 1992, his work has featured several times in the Filmmakers of the Present section, notably with The Arena of Murder, about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1996). In parallel, his fiction films, often constructed as trilogies, have won him world-wide recognition and been screened at the most important international festivals, from Esther (1985) to Free Zone (2005), via Berlin-Jerusalem (1989), Kadosh (1999) and Kippur (2000). Disengagement, featuring Juliette Binoche, was screened at the Venice Festival in 2007, and One Day, You Will Understand, with Jeanne Moreau, was shown at the last edition of the Berlin Festival.

Frédéric Maire, Artistic Director comments, “Amos Gitai occupies a very special place in the landscape of contemporary cinema. Deeply rooted in a geography and a history – that of Israel - his work constantly interrogates both past and present, current events and memory, travel and exile, man and his homeland. But above all, every one of his films confronts us with the infinite complexity of reality, whether it be via political documentary, economic treatise, historical or mythological panorama, a story of war or social portrait. A highly prolific filmmaker, Gitai is above all a civic-minded free spirit, for whom film is first of all the expression of a critical look at the world.”

The Locarno International Film Festival’s Leopard of Honour pays tribute every year to a major director who is still active. Previous recipients of this prestigious award include Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Joe Dante, Daniel Schmid, Ken Loach, Ermanno Olmi, Terry Gilliam, Abbas Kiarostami, Wim Wenders, Alexander Sokurov and, in 2007, Hou Hsiao-Hsien.