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WALTZ WITH BASHIR Send This Review to a Friend
Not only is this a harrowing personal memoir but it is a further example of how the art of animation can be used in pursuit of serious goals. “Waltz with Bashir,” shown at the 2008 New York Film Festival, was written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. The film comes across as a catharsis for Folman, as well as a cry of conscience at the atrocities committed at the Sabra and Shatila camps during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
The filmmaker, who served in that war, heard about the repeated nightmare of a friend about dogs he had been ordered to kill in order to silence them and not have their barking alert the enemy. The animated dogs illustrating the situation are frightening. Since Folman had suppressed his own memories of the conflict, he set about interviewing other former combatants, and the result dredges up feelings of guilt at the horrors inflicted.
An inquiry about the much-publicized massacres of civilians did not blame the Israelis for committing them, but indicated that they were allowed to happen under Israel’s watch and that Israeli military should not have permitted the Lebanese Christian Phalangist Militia to enter the camps.
The film culminates in the horror of the massacre, and at that point Folman resorts to real film that shows the devastation. It is a powerful, deeply upsetting conclusion that leaves one shattered, and it illustrates the terrible consequences that can engulf civilians in wartime and have an impact on those who lived through such events and continue to be plagued by the memories long afterward. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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