diverse Access has been granted to the first trailer for “Why War,” written and directed by Israeli director Amos Gitai. The film, starring Irene Jacob, Mathieu Amalric, Micah Lescott, and Jérôme Kircher, will have its world premiere on August 31 at the Venice Film Festival in an out-of-competition screening.
The film is inspired by correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud about how humanity can avoid war. It is also based on Virginia Woolf's work “Three Pounds”, which examines the relations of dominance in sex, to which Susan Sontag responds in an essay called “Concerning the Pain of Others”, and speaks about the symbolism of war.
“When the attack happened on October 7, I wanted to read and reread some of the texts to ask for help and understand the roots of this human desire to engage in war and killing,” Gitai said in a statement. “In this research, the exchange of letters was a revelation.”
“This correspondence between Einstein and Freud continues my research on how to avoid armed conflicts, and how to find peaceful solutions to reconcile divergent positions. Around this extraordinary dialogue between two brilliant intellectuals, I have built a poetic film in which war never appears,” he adds.
“I have lived through racial, religious and political divisions, always trying not to get caught up in them. For me, cinema has a civic mission. That’s what I try to bring to my filmmaking. We live in a world where dialogue is increasingly complicated and rare, and that plays into the hands of extremists, as we see in many parts of the world. So it’s not a film that wants to provide an answer, but rather to make us all question ourselves,” he concludes.
“I would like to build bridges instead of burning them. I believe that as filmmakers, and indeed as artists in general, we should not surrender to divisions. On the eve of October 7, I knew that we were in an explosive situation in Israel, but this awareness did not lessen the shock for someone like me, who has always tried to convince Israelis and Palestinians to talk through art. This is what I have been doing for years in my films and theater. In ancient times, the traditional role of artists was to be healers. To heal souls. I would like to embrace the idea of the filmmaker or artist as healer.”
The film was produced by Agav Films and Elefant Films, in association with Gad Fiction, United King Films, Indiana Production, and Live and Survive.
Gitai participated in the official competition in Venice with the films Berlin-Jerusalem (1989), Eden (2001), Alila (2003), The Promised Land (2004), I Am Arab (2013), The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin (2015), and Laila in Haifa (2020). He also participated in the official competition in Cannes with the films Kadosh (1999), Kippur (2000), Kedma (2002), and Free Zone (2005).
