Amos Gitai's "Free Zone"

Amos Gitai, who is beyond any serious doubt the most important filmmaker in Israeli history, sits in an overstuffed armchair and talks me through the opening shots of his extraordinary new movie, "Free Zone." He's a solid, stolid man, who commands attention without moving or speaking loudly.

"We begin with the simplest of all things," he says. "A female figure, inside a car. [The woman is Natalie Portman, playing an American named Rebecca. She is crying.] We vaguely see the Wailing Wall behind her, if we know it's there. And she gives us, for more than seven minutes, the most spectacular performance in the most minimalist terms. How can a human face on a screen, the most basic thing, create so much serial variation of emotion? To charge things up a bit more, I put music over this -- the Jewish song of Passover. [It's the traditional song "Chad Gadya," performed by the Israeli pop star Chava Alberstein.] Maybe to make a proposition, or to question: Is the traumatic event not just intimate, but also coming from a larger scale?"

There is another woman in the car, an Israeli taxi driver named Hanna, played by Hanna Laslo (who won an acting prize at Cannes last year for this role). She too has good reason to be crying, although we don't know that yet. "We don't see her," Gitai continues. "We just hear her. Then we go to the next shot. First we see Hanna only in the mirror, and then, in the same shot, the border scene [as the two women cross from Israel into Jordan] will unveil the purpose of the journey."

This means, he goes on, that in the traditional organization of a film into several 16- or 17-minute reels, the entire first reel of "Free Zone" consists of two shots. The first lasts for seven minutes, the second about nine. So begins another of Gitai's dense and ambitious films, which have made him a celebrated figure in international cinema. In the last two or three years, Gitai's country has caught up to him. With the release of films like "Walk on Water," "Ushpizin," "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride," which all resist simplistic political analysis, you could say that Gitai's version of cinema has also become Israel's.

"From the beginning, which is now 25 years ago," Gitai says, "my argument was that we should do strong cinema, because the story of Israel is a big drama. I think strong cultures can stomach strong works of art or literature or cinema."

Despite the fact that he's a decorated veteran who was nearly killed defending Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Gitai has treated his nation's self-mythologizing skeptically in both his fiction films and documentaries. Some Israelis didn't welcome this treatment, and he left the country for several years after making "Field Diary," his 1982 documentary about Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon. But enough time has passed that he's become something of a father figure in Israeli film, even if, like his nation, he's still relatively young (he's 55, just two years younger than Israel itself). His films "Kedma," "Kadosh" and "Kippur" were international hits, and comprehensive sets of his early films, including the explosive documentaries, have just been released on DVD.

"When you do this kind of work, I suppose you're not doing it for the sake of being hugged and caressed by your countrymen," he says. "If it comes later, it's better. If you are hugged and caressed too early, then maybe your films become less interesting."

"Free Zone" takes Rebecca, the jilted American, and Hanna, the garrulous cab driver, on a mysterious journey across the Jordan River toward an economic "free zone" where Arabs, Israelis and others from all over the Middle East come together in a wide-open postmodern bazaar, where everything is for sale. Along the way they pick up a Palestinian woman named Leila (the great Israeli Arab actress Hiam Abbass), and their voyage, while never leaving reality behind, becomes increasingly symbolic.

Gitai's experimental technique in "Free Zone" is dizzying, sometimes thrilling. After we leave the stark simplicity of the first reel behind, he begins to superimpose layers of images and sound upon each other: We're in the car driving through Jordan, but we're also witnessing Rebecca breaking up with her fiancé and Hanna finding her husband grievously injured on their kibbutz by a Palestinian rocket attack and numerous other things besides. There are sometimes up to 12 fragments of narrative simultaneously in process, and once you give up trying to keep track of them all, and just process what you can, the effect is exhilarating.

"We are capable of having feelings or thoughts that are totally different but occur simultaneously," Gitai says. "When I was approaching this film, I thought to myself that cinema can give us a lot of technical ways of dealing with this, and then came the idea of these layers. We have a very selective, interesting mechanism to switch off or on different facets of our perception."

The idea, he explains, originated in his own narrow escape during the Yom Kippur war. "As you may know, I served in a helicopter," he says, "and during the conflict my helicopter was shot down by the Syrians. The copilot of the helicopter, who was roughly sitting the same distance from me as we are sitting, was decapitated by the missile. The second pilot managed to save us. He managed to fly three more minutes, with a dead pilot beside him and no steering, just holding on with his muscles, and crash-land on the Israeli side. I asked him: 'What did you hear?' He said, 'I didn't hear anything.'"

In the 30 years since then, the Middle East has changed a lot, perhaps both for better and for worse. But the young Amos Gitai who nearly died in that helicopter -- in a war that could well have led to Israel's destruction -- could scarcely have imagined making a film about an American, an Israeli and a Palestinian making an ambiguous journey into the future "in the same box," as he puts it. Nor could he have imagined filming most of it inside an Arab country, the first time any Israeli filmmaker has officially done so. Gitai says he considered "finding other ways" to shoot inside Jordan, but ultimately decided to write a letter to the Royal Film Commission. After some delay, he was invited to Amman to meet its director, who admired his work.

"I was very moved, because even with countries where Israel has peace agreements, like Jordan and Egypt, there are hardly any cultural relations. Maybe military, political and commercial relations, but no culture. The only thing I said to her was that I wouldn't shoot exotic scenery. No camels in the sunset. I wanted to show Jordan for what it is, highways, parking lots, you know -- not very different from Israel."

"Free Zone" opens April 7 in New York, with other cities to follow.