The latest film by the prolific filmmaker, theater director, architect and artist has just been announced as a Berlinale Special at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. 

Whenever I think about Palestinian or Israeli cinema, I remember the line that Harry Lime utters to his friend, just as he’s walking away from the amusement park, in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock,” says Orson Welles, who also famously came up with the line, to Joseph Cotten. 

Filmmakers from the Holy Land, Palestine, Israel — or whatever you wish to call that contented and contested piece of land which takes up a space on earth no larger than Haiti — just seem to be so much better at making films that will appeal to world cinema audiences. Probably because of the struggles each side has faced, the ongoing wars and hardships which Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers are then able to interpret and relate to the audience. 

And help explain the situation where the world’s media too often fail. 

One of those filmmakers is Amos Gitai. His latest film, Shikun will world premiere at the Berlinale this February, and it is bound to cause a stir. 

During past interviews — I’ve been lucky enough to have sat down with Gitai on several occasions — I’ve often wondered out loud what causes his prophetic style of filmmaking. He always seems to be ahead of the times when he makes a movie. With this film probably more than ever, following the events of October 7th and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza which has highlighted what Gitai calls “the rise of a form of conformism, the disappearance of the critical spirit, in Israeli society,” in an interview included in the film’s press notes. Silence by the people has always led to trouble and tragedy, and no group knows that better, or understands that more deeply than the Jewish people. 

Shikun is based on a Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros written at the end of the 1950s as an anti-totalitarian fable. The title of the film, confirms Gitai, “means ‘social housing’ in Hebrew, a building for people to live in,” and comes from a verb meaning "to shelter", "to give refuge". 

The synopsis for Shikun reads like this: “Inspired by Eugène Ionesco's play, the film recounts the emergence of intolerance and totalitarian thinking through a series of day-to-day episodes that take place in Israel in a single building, the Shikun. In this hybrid group of people of different origins and languages, some turn into rhinoceroses, but others resist. An ironic metaphor for life in our contemporary societies.” 

For Gitai, who studied architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, the building inside which he filmed held a special kind of attraction, and created a lot of the inspiration for the actions in the film. “It's a well-known building, said to be the longest in the Middle East, at over 250 meters long. And it is indeed a shikun, a social housing building,” he explains in the press notes. “It stands in the town of Beer-Sheva in the centre of the Negev desert in southern Israel,” which is the epicenter of where the Hamas invasion and violence took place on October 7th. Gitai continues, “the building itself is a powerful architectural gesture, in the spirit of Le Corbusier, a kind of coup de force, a statement in the middle of the desert.” 

The Berlinale press release announcing the 20 films which will complete their Berlinale Special line up, stated this regarding Shikun: “Drawing inspiration from the great Ionesco and with an astonishing performance by Irène Jacob, Amos Gitai takes us into a building that is a metaphor for our chaotic society and the attempt to create the platform for a dialogue in the Middle East.”

Frequent Gitai collaborators accompany him on this latest cinematic adventure, including Irène Jacob who takes on the role of Bérenger, which in Ionesco’s play is a male character. The role has been played in past productions by the likes of Laurence Olivier and Eli Wallach, among others. Recently, there has been a welcomed new wave of theater and film productions which explore parts clearly written for a specific gender or an understood race by turning the casting upside down. It worked perfectly on the West End when rockstar and actress Lily Allen took over the role of Katurian in Martin McDonaugh’s The Pillowman, I can only guess that Jacob will shine in Gitai’s interpretation of Ionesco’s work, where she also helps to play other characters. 

So how did the Israeli filmmaker, who also calls Paris home at certain times of the year, come up with this idea, once again so timely and prophetic? Gitai and his peers were already in the midst of a huge protest movement against what Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right were doing to the country’s legal system, when he re-read the play by Ionesco. This coincided with the rehearsals in Tel Aviv of the play House, based on his 1980’s film, and which will soon be in London, after playing in Paris in the spring of 2023. “At the same time as we were working on the play, we got collectively involved in this project, which I wrote quite quickly,” Gitai explains, continuing,”I called the cinematographer Eric Gautier, with whom I've worked on four of my previous films over the last twelve years, and he arrived straight away. We were able to put together the material conditions and shoot without delay, thanks also to the complicity of the producers, technicians and artists with whom I have this long relationship of collaboration and friendship.”

From the description and the actors involved I have a feeling that Shikun will leave me devastated, but also exhilarated as all other films by Gitai. His work is always entertaining, but also teaches the viewer a lesson in humanity, without ever trying to preach or teach, as Gitai himself admits, “above all, I don't want to be didactic.” He won’t use tricks like coloring the subtitles to give audiences who don’t understand Arabic and Hebrew an idea of what language is being spoken, as the characters include Palestinians, Israelis and Ukrainians. Similarly to what he did with Laila in Haifa, which premiered in Venice a few years ago, Gitai wants us to understand the similarities in their humanity, not the differences in their languages. 

Shikun, “is about the chaos of the world, the chaos created by war, economic inequality and injustice,” the filmmaker also points out and as he told me many times before, the responsibly for peace rests on all sides. And we know that there are no innocent governments in war. 

“Reality is the result of heterogeneous forces, chance and illogical interference. And in the midst of all this, there is an active force: fear,” as Gitai says and “fear is not a given, it is constructed, it is manufactured, and leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, etc. are engineers of fear, and obviously so is Hamas. They thrive on the feeling of fear that they produce and maintain.” Amen. 

According to Gitai’s notes, the film ends with a poem by Mahmood Darwish, the famous Palestinian poet, and features a stunning Palestinian actress Bahira Ablassi who featured in Gitai’s previous work, the 2020 film Laila in Haifa. “There's also a passage from Umberto Eco, on cowardice,” according to Gitai’s notes, “and also a text by Israeli journalist and writer Amira Hass, who was the Haaretz newspaper's correspondent in the occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank, for decades, I believe she's still in Ramallah. The text on "Our children will ask: how could you (inflict the injustices and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians for so many years)?" is based on one of her writings.” Another actress featured in Shikun is frequent Gitai collaborator Yaël Abecassis, who also perfectly represents the duality, the inner conflict of being Israeli today — one foot in her Arab roots (her parents are Moroccan Jews), the other in being a Jewish Israeli.

An elephant in the room is that once things become more difficult, much like airport measures after 9/11 and the likes, they never go back to being easier. Russian filmmakers disappeared from line ups of world film festivals — to never really return after the war with Ukraine started. And one wonders if this is going to happen with Israeli filmmakers? And then filmmakers from Northern Yemen, and all other filmmakers who come from what the liberal left proclaims “unwanted territories” or enemy states. Will we then only be left with a couple of countries, mainly Western European and the US, which make cinema without being problematic in origin? Gitai quietly pointed out to me that few festivals are accepting Israeli films these days. Even his own brand of Israeli cinema, hellbent on creating peace — which is always the most dangerous stance to take in conflict. 

“After October 7 and what followed, I hesitated, I wondered what to do, I considered not releasing the film, or modifying it,” Gitai admits but “in the end, I decided to show it exactly as it was made. It seems to me that the film is internally coherent, and that what is shown in it can also be shared in today's context. Perhaps, given the proliferation of rhinoceroses, it offers an even more relevant approach.”

The Berlinale will run from February 15th to the 25th, 2024.

Shikun is produced by Amos Gitai, Laurent Truchot, Ilan Moskovitch, Catherine Dussart and Shuki Friedman, co-produced by Gilles Masson, Nathalie Varagnat, Moshe Edery, Alexandre Iordachescu, Alan Terpins, Marcello Brennand, Lisabeth Sander and Luiz Simoes Lopes Neto with Jeremy Thomas and João Queiroz Filho as EP.