WALTZ WITH BASHIR

For The Cannes International Film Festival competition on Thursday, May 15th

WALTZ WITH BASHIR (1h27) Directed by Ari Folman

Israel

Documents the filmmaker’s journey toward discovering the truth about an Israeli Army mission he participated in during the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s that left him with a loss of memory about the events. The long-forgotten images begin to resurface as the director interviews old friends and comrades around the world.

Screen Daily: Ari Folman’s animated documentary could easily turn out to be one of the most powerful statements of this Cannes and will leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general. … This is not only a tremendously potent antiwar movie but also a formidable moral indictment of Israeli conduct at that time.

Guardian: This film is remarkable, for one, in the very fact that it exists at all: It is a mea culpa, created by someone intimately connected with events. Director (and central figure) Ari Folman doesn’t attempt to evade, soft-pedal or make excuses. He presents the film as therapy; his own attempt to recover the blocked memories of what actually happened. In doing so, he himself makes an explicit connection between the death camps Jews had fled in Europe, and the refugee camps in which Palestinians were housed and brutalised in Lebanon. Folman isn’t pulling any punches.

Cinematical: Where Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” (to which this film will be inevitably, if somewhat inaccurately, compared) used stark black-and-white animation based on Satrapi’s graphic novels to tell the history of one girl growing up during the Iranian revolution, “Waltz With Bashir” uses vivid, hand-drawn animation to bring to life interviews Folman conducted with friends who were involved in the Lebanese war in the early 1980s to bring to life harrowing memories of death, guilt and regret.

Variety: A subject that might, had it been made conventionally, have repped just another docu about a war atrocity, is transmuted via novel use of animation into something special, strange and peculiarly potent in “Waltz With Bashir.” … Although less immediately accessible than “Persepolis,” another mature-aud-skewed cartoon with which this is bound to be compared, “Bashir” could dance nimbly round arthouse niches offshore.

The Los Angeles Times: Folman’s basic message is hardly unfamiliar: No good can come from a bunch of frightened, disoriented boys carrying far too much live ammo. But most of us have yet to see the particulars of this conflict (culminating in the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps), nor have we been privvy to the nuanced and guilt-ridden memories of its perpetrators/survivors. The storytelling is lumpy and misshapen, but the film’s shocking ending is as affecting as it is abrupt.

Follow Us

Become a Fan on Facebook