Who wants to hear about genocide? Not me. Not most of us. So how does a filmmaker tell a story of humanity’s turn against itself? In WALTZ WITH BASHIR Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman does this with empathy and satisfying innovation. Told as a present-day mystery, WALTZ WITH BASHIR explores Folman’s repressed memories of his experiences as a 19-year-old soldier in Israel’s 1982 offensive against Lebanon. His relentless interrogation of these memories brings to light details of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps following the war, actions performed by the Lebanese Christian Militia (known as the Phalangists) after the assassination of Bashir Gemayal, their leader. Israel sided with the Phalangists, giving tacit support to the massacres -- circumstances that eventually led to the resignation of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Defense Minister at the time.

Folman chooses an affecting way to present his lost memories. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is an animated film; in fact, it is an “animated documentary.” The film tells a true story, based on conversations with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who, like the director himself, also could not remember the three-day-long massacre of Palestinians, despite their proximity to the refugee camps. Animated versions of the men appear in the film, and the dialogue comes from taped interviews with the soldiers themselves, who are also named. (Two of the interviewees requested anonymity and were given alias identities, with their words voiced by actors). The stark drawings connect the flashbacks of the middle-aged men to their experiences as adolescent soldiers in 1982. Here, animation is used to create a new approach to narrative, a melding of present and past that engages us and works against our desire to close our eyes to evil. The film reminded me why we need such stories of war’s horrors; I felt buoyed by humanity’s capacity for insight rather than buried beneath the brutality and blame of genocide. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is more than a film -- it is a transformative work of art.

Fiction films that address the atrocities of war usually strive to provoke an emotional response. For instance, Terry George’s HOTEL RWANDA (2004) shows the 1994 massacre of Tutsis by Hutus from the victims’ point of view, emphasizing both the terror and uncommon heroism that arose. A more ironic approach can be found in Danis Tanovic’s NO MAN’S LAND (2001), which humanizes Serb/Bosnian animosity by placing two enemies face to face in a trench, standing on the same land mine.

Documentaries, in contrast, tend to be more analytical, combining the inevitable talking head interviews with news footage and photographs. This is exactly the approach director Folman wanted to avoid when he set out to make an “animated documentary” (seemingly a contradiction in terms, as Folman discusses in the interview included in the special features section of the DVD release). Folman said in an interview: "When you look at everything that there is in this film -- lost memory, memories of war, which are probably the most surreal things on Earth, dreams, subconscious, drugs, hallucination -- [animation] was the only way to combine one fluid storyline… If it was a classic documentary, it would have shown middle-aged men telling their war experiences… with footage that you could never find, and [it] wouldn't come close to resembling what they went through. It would be a boring film. And if you made a big action movie with the budget of an Israeli movie, that would just be sad."

Folman’s approach has something in common with graphic novelist Joe Sacco, who has used comic drawings to depict traumas in Palestine and Bosnia; but, because it is a film, WALTZ WITH BASHIR brings a sense of immediacy to its story, its inventive moving images overlaid with the actual voices of the former soldiers trying to recall events, backed by an intriguing sound track of 1980s music. The revelatory nature of WALTZ WITH BASHIR also has something in common with NIGHT AND FOG (1955), Alain Resnais’ classic documentary about Nazi death camps, and Marcel Ophuls THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1969), which both reveal how, beneath a seemingly calm exterior, the utter unraveling of humanity can occur -- first, in the annihilation of a population, but then through subsequent denials by the perpetrators.

Some have criticized WALTZ WITH BASHIR for minimizing the fact of mass murder by focusing on the post-traumatic stress experienced by Israeli soldiers. Although it is clear that Israel’s allies, the Christian Phalangists, actually killed the Palestinians (murdering between 400 to 3,000 people in a few days), it is equally certain that Israel bore indirect responsibility for the massacres as well. Israel’s own Kahan Commission determined that Israel commanders (including Ariel Sharon) allowed the Phalangists to enter the camps in the first place. The Commission also concluded that Israeli commanders ignored rumors of massacre, when they should have taken immediate action.

After the tribunals and war crime convictions have passed, society must figure out how to return to everyday life, and artists are often the ones who take on the burden of answering such questions. Any attempt to humanize war’s carnage will inevitably bring criticism, but society needs to understand all points of view, including that of the soldier. Folman realizes that his film does not present us with any heroes. As he says in the DVD interview, “Nobody wants to be the guy in this film.” Which is to say, no one wants to be him. He finally recalls his unit’s role in the massacre, concluding that they launched the flares that allowed the Phalangists to find their victims in the camps at night. Likewise, Folman’s film highlights for viewers the ways we are all capable of repressing knowledge of violent injustice; by animating the past, WALTZ WITH BASHIR gives new clarity to today’s images of collateral damage.

Who wants to know about the brutality of war? Perhaps no one. But some of the greatest works of civilization encourage us to face such crimes against humanity, so that we, like Oedipus Rex, might recognize our own blindness and the plague it creates. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is one of these works, a reminder of humanity’s great capacity for evil and for truth.

-- Katie Mills

Katie Mills is a film scholar who lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Occidental College. She is the author of The Road Story and The Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction and Television (SIU Press, 2006).

Won: Best Foreign Language Film, 2009 Golden Globes;

Won: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, 2008 Awards of the Israeli Film Academy

Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film, 2009 Academy Awards;

Nominated: Golden Palm, 2008 Cannes Film Festival;

"Hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war." – Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE