Waltz With Bashir

Rating: * * * * *

Verdict

:

Provocative, arresting and powerful.

The event around which this extraordinary debut film revolves is the September 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. While Israeli

forces stood by, Lebanese Christian militia, angered by the slaughter of their leader Bashir Gemayel, slaughtered - the number is disputed - at least 382 and perhaps as many as 2000 civilians.

But film-maker Folman is concerned to do much more than simply depict an event every bit as shameful and horrific as My Lai or Srebrenica. His film, as provocative and brave as it is formally innovative, is concerned with a deeper, wider reality: the danger that we will forget what we dare not confront.

This is the subject Patricio Guzman dealt with so powerfully in the 1997 film Chile: Obstinate Memory, in which he returned to a country where memory of the unspeakably violent 1973 military coup had virtually disappeared in less than a generation.

But Folman's film is more unflinching because he targets himself: as an Israeli soldier, he was outside the camps and - at least in the on-screen characterisation he has created - he can't, or won't, remember what happened.

It seems glib to characterise Folman's film as an Israeli Apocalypse Now - even though there is a sequence on a surf beach that specifically references that crazy American masterpiece - because it is so stylistically different. Its form is rough, even stilted, animation of hand-drawn, underground-cartoon images, but its content is pure documentary: we see Ari in conversation with former platoon buddies - many of whom voice themselves - as he tries to reconcile competing versions of what happened 25 years ago.

Yet because it's an animated film, it can move seamlessly between naturalistic re-enactment, extravagant re-imagining and a potent evocation of his and others' dreams and fears. The film takes place in a landscape where the real and the metaphorical co-exist: it becomes something unique and original, a documentary fantasia.

Folman has come in for criticism on the grounds that animation somehow sanitises the reality of what occurred, which seems to miss the point - and an abrupt switch to archival television footage in the last moments is a complete defence against the charge in any case. This is unquestionably one of the films of the year, a deeply intelligent and arresting meditation on the tragedy of forgetting and the importance of remembering. Don't miss it.

Peter Calder

Director

: Ari Folman

Running time:

87 mins

Rating

: R16 (violence, offensive language, sex scenes and content that may disturb)

In Hebrew with English subtitles

Screening

: Academy