War veteran tackles Israel's 'collective amnesia' [View All]

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" Israel's Ari Folman, in Cannes to premiere his fiercely anti-war animation "Waltz With Bashir," says his country is awash with ex-soldiers like himself who have repressed horrific memories of their time in the Israeli army.

"A world expert on post-trauma I interviewed in the film told me that in Israel there are thousands of walking bombs," he told AFP in an interview, saying the country was suffering from a "collective amnesia."

"People, ex-soldiers who can live their lives, nothing happening, everything's cool, but one day they could just burst out and you will never know what will happen," he said.

"Waltz With Bashir," the Cannes film festival's first ever fully-animated documentary, deals with repressed memories, the horrors of war and Israel's dubious role in a notorious 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in a camp in Beirut.

The highly personal tale recounts Folman's quest to fill the holes in his memory of his stint as a 19-year-old conscript in Israel's army. It ends with him realising he was one of the many Israeli soldiers positioned around the camp but who did nothing to stop the massacre by a Christian militia."

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Israeli animation on Beirut massacre bids for top Cannes prize

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"Repressed memories, the horrors of war and Israel's dubious role in a notorious Beirut refugee camp massacre are the themes of the Cannes film festival's first ever fully-animated documentary.

"Waltz With Bashir," said Screen magazine in one of the first reviews, "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."

Ari Folman's anti-war movie, in the running for the Palme d'Or top prize, is premiered here as Israel celebrates its 60th year of existence and its neighbour Lebanon hits yet another political crisis pushing it to the brink of civil war.

Opening with thumping rock music as snarling dogs hurtle through city streets, the highly personal tale recounts the director's quest to fill the holes in his memory of his stint as a 19-year-old conscript in Israel's army.

He was baffled by why he couldn't remember much of his role in Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli-backed Christian milita in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

So Folman, a longtime documentary filmmaker in Israel, tracks down nine people who were either with him at the time or were involved in the events, and then slowly pieces together his own actions.

He then wrote a narrative script and got artists to transform the interviews into animation.

"There was no other way to do it," he told reporters here. "Otherwise it would have been pictures of middle-aged men going on about stories that happened 20 years ago."

The result is a visually and emotionally gripping tale that brings to life harrowing and sometimes surreal memories of death, guilt and regret."

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