Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir (2008, Director: Ari Folman): I think calling this an anim­ated doc­u­mentary might be stretching it a bit, but dir­ector Ari Folman has cre­ated some­thing really inter­esting. He’s used anim­a­tion to go where doc­u­mentary film­making hasn’t been able to take us before, into the memories, dreams and night­mares of its sub­jects. The film starts when Ari (looking uncan­nily like Italian film diarist Nanni Morretti) shares a drink with an old army buddy who describes his recur­ring night­mare of being chased by 28 dogs. After finding out that this relates to spe­cific incid­ents from the 1982 Lebanon war, we dis­cover that Ari Folman has little recol­lec­tion of his par­ti­cip­a­tion in that con­flict. But after this meeting, he begins having a strange recur­ring dream and after con­sulting a psy­cho­lo­gist friend, he decides he needs to try to figure out why his memory seems blocked.

As he inter­views other par­ti­cipants in the war, he begins to piece together his part in a larger nar­rative, that of Israeli com­pli­ance in the mas­sacre of thou­sands of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. “Christian” Phalangist mili­tias entered the camps and mas­sacred men, women and chil­dren for three hor­rific days, killing more than 3,000. Despite the mili­tias’ stated aim of rooting out Palestinian fighters, the vast majority of these fighters had been evac­u­ated weeks before. The blood­bath was widely seen as revenge for the assas­sin­a­tion of the Phalangists’ leader, the recently-elected President Bashir Gemayel. Although Folman’s memory is never com­pletely reli­able, he seems to remember his army unit firing flares so that the mili­tias could carry out their work at night.

The most shocking moment of the film comes right at the end, when the anim­a­tion sud­denly snaps into real-life video footage of the carnage, leaving a dra­matic impres­sion. Despite the unre­li­ab­ility of memory, and the nature of guilt (both sur­vivor guilt and that of someone who killed other human beings) and its effect on the mind, this footage is evid­ence of a real atro­city, and Folman and his com­rades have had to live with their part in this tragedy for more than twenty years. It’s no wonder that he used anim­a­tion; it’s the per­fect way to recreate nightmares.

Unfortunately, the dir­ector flew home after the film’s opening screening and wasn’t present for a Q&A.

Official site of the film
Trailer

(8/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, guilt, israel, lebanon, memory, palestine, war