Film Review: Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir" premiered in Tel-Aviv this week. I attended the premier with much reluctance: I had a sinking feeling that I would be witnessing a filmmaker's rendition of Golda Meir's words: "We will never forgive the Palestinians for making us kill them." I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

The film documents the struggle of filmmaker Ari Folman to come to terms with the gaps in his memory surrounding his role as an Israeli soldier during Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila which left thousands of innocent civilians dead.

Using brilliant, hand-drawn animation (perhaps as a means of separating himself from the horrifically real events that took place), Folman weaves together the stories of his friends and fellow soldiers in order to highlight the atrocities committed by the Israeli army.

The film opens with a pack of mad dogs running down a street, finally stopping beneath a building to growl menacingly at a man looking down from a window. The dogs, as it turns out, come from a recurring nightmare of one of Folman's friends, Boaz. There are exactly 26 dogs -- 26, because that's the number of dogs his friend shot and killed to silence their barking before they could warn villages about to be invaded of the approach of the troops moving in. Like Boaz, Ari is plagued by a past he cannot recall. He sets out to sift through the memories of other Israeli soliders (7 firsthand accounts, 2 secondhand accounts), to make sense of the one image that he can recall of his time during the invasion.

Folman doesn't attempt to make any excuses: he points the finger at Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s president-elect whose assassination preceded the mass murder at the camps, and at Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli war minister (now comatose). Mr. Folman also doesn’t hide what soldiers do in wartime: at the sniper who lethally picks a man off a donkey, at the tank that crushes cars under its wheels, destroying buildings and running over people. The finale, which finds the animation violently giving way to live-action documentary footage, is stunning and difficult to watch.

The film was difficult to watch at times: it brought back my own memories of Israel's actions in Gaza in 2001 when I witnessed the assassination of a Palestinian man by an Apache helicopter and later in 2002 when Israel dropped a one-ton bomb in Gaza City killing 15 Palestinians (I am still haunted by the images of children being pulled from the wreckage); in the spring of 2002 when I lived through Israel's siege of the West Bank and the takeover of my home by the army. I often wondered during those periods whether the soldiers ever remember their crimes, or did they, like Ari Folman, choose to bury them instead. Thankfully Folman has now revealed his own secrets. I just hope that others will too.