For smarter audiences… WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Memory doesn’t serve. Ari Folman did. As a young man, the filmmaker participated in the Israeli army’s incursion into southern Lebanon in 1982. During the bloody war, Israelis allowed Christian Phalangists to slaughter Palestinians in refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila. Many military leaders pleaded plausible deniability. They did not/could not foresee the massacres. (Uh-huh. Who knew Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie shouldn’t sit together at the Golden Globes?) Folman could only plead ignorance. Decades later, he was incapable of conjuring his past. However, with the assistance of fellow vets and his own (imagined?) flashbacks, he recreates his role as thinker, tale-teller, soldier espied in this astonishing, animated feature-length documentary. Had Folman relied solely on talking heads,WALTZ WITH BASHIR would have stumbled, footless in its rote reiterations. Instead, the somewhat crude cartooning — like an embedded Ralph Bakshi chronicling Operation Iraqi Liberation — resonates with our own fears of accountability or lack thereof, for atrocities perpetuated in our name and, sometimes, at our hands. Folman sweeps viewers across literal and figurative battlefields, all the while dancing with the scars.

For the WALTZ WITH BASHIR trailer and more info, please visit: http://waltzwithbashir.com/