Israeli director Amos Gitai has batted back calls for a boycott of his Venice work Why War and said both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict need to clean out their current leaderships for peace to prevail.
Premiering this weekend of Out of Competition in Venice, Why War takes its cue from correspondence in the early 1930s between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the question of the human race’s bellicose nature and how to avoid war.
The work mixes reenactments of the two figures reciting their exchanges, with historic images of war in art and acted scenes of characters dealing with the psychological impact of conflict.
It was initiated after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed more than 1,000 people, and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, which has wreaked destruction on the territory and killed more than 40,000 people.
Read more on deadline.com