"Waltz with Bashir" uses animation to tell its story of war and its trauma
The Israeli filmmaker, even at 45, looks like a man who could stop bullets. But he could not. The story he tells and the cinematic style he tells it in emerge from the hell of war: in 1982 the Israeli incursion into Lebanon lead to the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps. The Israeli troops stood by and let the Christian Phalangist militia kill off the Palestinians in the camps. The film that Folman made is about this trauma. It is the story of a generation, the early '80s teenage Israelis who left their rock 'n' roll dance halls, roared off to war without a pang, and then resumed their lives.
"Animation was the only way to tell this story; I was sure of that," the director says.
"The film talks about lost memory and how you may have a different memory from what actually happened. It asks the question I had to ask myself: where does memory hide?
clipped from: www.iht.com 