Amos Gitai, was born on October 11, 1950 in Haifa, Israel, and is one of the most acclaimed Israeli filmmakers in the world, with great retrospectives of his works at the Georges Pompidou Center, MoMA, Lincoln Center New York , At the British Film Institute and others. It has more than 40 films, documentaries and fiction, which have been widely distributed. Between 1999 and 2011, seven of his films compete at the Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d’Or as well as at the Venice Film Festival for the Golden Lion.

Amos Gitai returns to the Occupied Territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary Field Diary. West of the Jordan River describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of the Occupation. Gitai’s film shows the human ties woven by human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers, the military, and Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the Occupation, these women and men rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for a long overdue change.