A LETTER TO A FRIEND IN GAZA Will Have UK Premiere

Part theatre, part film, and part tribute to Albert Camus' Letters to a German Friend, A Letter to a Friend in Gaza is Amos Gîtai's elegiac and moving address to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told through the perspectives of those living it.

Four actors - two Palestinian and two Israeli - seated at a long table, read each other poems, writings and letters by Palestinian and Israeli writers and thinkers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Yizhar Smilansky and Emile Habibi, against a backdrop of news and archive footage and feeds from the on-stage cameras, interwoven with a soundtrack from musicians Bruno Maurice (accordion), Kioomars Musayyebi (santoor), Alexey Kochetkov (violin).

A performance about reconciliation, dialogue, and humankind, its seemingly spartan format is more than a sum of its parts. At times poetic and at others abrasive, Gîtai was moved to make this piece by rage at the continued bloodshed in the region. Like Albert Camus' Letters to a German Friend, in which he sought to find common ground between warring peoples, Gîtai seeks to find the shared experience of those on opposing sides.

With some forty films to his name, the multi award-winning Gîtai has been making films, theatre and video installations for nearly forty years, and has worked with Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau, Natalie Portman, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla and Annie Lennox. This production is inspired by letters from Gîtai's mother, Efratia Gîtai.

Direction & Set Design: Amos Gîtai;
Texts by: Mahmoud Darwish, Yizhar Smilansky, Emile Habibi, Amira Hass, Wislawa Szymborska and Albert Camus;
Additional Music: Alex Claude; Surtitles: Ibtisam Ammouri; Assistant Director: Ayda Melika; Production Manager: Laurent Truchot

A READING OF EFRATIA GÎTAI'S CORRESPONDENCES

Sunday 24 November 6pm
With Hanna Schygulla, Makram J. Khoury, Yael Abecassi, Clara Khoury and special guest, Claire Bloom

Efratia Gîtai was Amos Gîtai's mother. She was born in Haifa, studied psychoanalysis in the intellectual and artistic bloom of 1930s Vienna, and married Bauhaus architect Munio Weinraub Gîtai in Palestine.

Through reading extracts from her letters between 1929 and 1994, we meet a woman who belonged to a secular milieu. We encounter her family, political figures, poets, intellectuals, and above all a group of extraordinary women.

Efratia wanted to preserve traces of seven decades of masterfully crafted letters as a way to understand the fate of her country.

Presented in association with the Primo Levi Foundation.

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