Greeted with a standing ovation at this year’s Cannes, at once poetic and horrifying, Waltz with Bashir depicts the true-life experience of its director, Israeli documentary maker Ari Folman, as a young soldier during the first Lebanon war of 1982.
Four years in the making, the animated documentary examines the trauma of war through the prism of Folman’s own inability to remember almost anything from his time in military service. By interviewing friends, comrades and experts, he pieces together the dark episodes his own memory had managed to repress.
The film has been beautifully animated in rotoscope – Folman conducted the interviews and then worked with a team of six animators to redraw the images – and the power of those images will no doubt be deepened by a haunting score by UK-based composer Max Richter.
If, like me, you’re too young to remember the film’s central focus, the terrible Sabra and Shatila massacre on 17th September 1982, in which up to 3,000 Palestinians were slaughtered by Christian militia while the Israeli army stood by, you could start by reading an eyewitness account via the BBC’s ‘On This Day’.
