In 1981 Amos Gitaï made a remarkable documentary simply entitled House. It was one of a number of films that he made exploring the situation of Palestinians living in Israel. Each of them revealing – without preaching and with great compassion – the situations of these displaced people. House was centred around an old home in Jerusalem that had been taken from its Arab owners – ‘displaced in one’s own city’ – and passed into Jewish Israeli hands.In A House in Jerusalem, Gitaï starts his exploration with a return to that film, that house and its original occupants. He then moves down the street, Dor Dor Vedorsav street in East Jerusalem, moving onto interviews with the current residents of this well-to-do neighbourhood, the Arab family who lived there in the past, an archeologist and more, and then weaving them together in with carefully choreographed images of the street.îIn the style characteristic of his best documentaries, Gitaï offers a sort of archeology in film form revealing the past and the present of a place. In A House in Jerusalem he creates a characteristically intelligent and insightful portrait not just of a street, but of a city and a country. Restrained and controlled, it is a film that is by turn surprisingly moving, tragic, quietly angry; a film about the politics of property and geography.
