Waltz with Bashir

Those dogs again – there are 26 of them, yapping and snarling. They stand in front of Boaz, ready to tear him apart. For a while now, the Israeli war veteran’s dreams are filled with only these dogs, and he knows that it’s not just the dogs that will eventually catch up with him in his dreams, it’s also his past. This past is 1982, when Boaz, together with nearly 80,000 other young men and women, was dispatched to Lebanon to wage a brief but bloody war against Palestinian troops. Fighting alongside him is Ari, who later became a film-maker. A quarter of a century later, however, he can’t remember a thing. This changes all of a sudden when Boaz tells him about his nightmares. It’s as if Ari’s subconscious has been jolted – suddenly, he sees snatches of images in his mind’s eye, but he can’t seem to place them. More than ever, he is confronted with the question of what really happened back then during the Lebanon War. Seeking answers, Ari visits some of his comrades-in-arms. Gradually, the gaps in his memory are filled – but what kind of picture will they show in the end?Even ten years after its release, the anidoc “Waltz with Bashir” has lost none of its emotional punch. Ari Folman created an intimate and unagitated work based on his own recollections and research. By means of reduced animation, the characters’ rigid, almost mechanical movements serve to comment on the brutal war in which the soldiers seem to have discarded their humanity and become marionettes in a foreign conflict.