Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman's brilliant animation documentary is an exercise in the reconstruction of reality and truth, none of which its protagonist, a traumatized teenage soldier participating in his first war, is able to remember with any clarity.

The film is autobiographical and follows the exploits of the director on the quest to find out what really happened during the Sabra and Shatila massacre - a mass killing of Muslim refugees by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist Militia. The massacre was part of the 1982 Lebanon War when Israel invaded its neighbour in response to repeated attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The mass killing was overlooked by Israel even though the forces on the ground knew that something was very wrong.

One of these neglectful soldiers was young Ari Folman. Like his friends and colleagues, he failed to stop the brutal murder of 3500 civilians, including children. Now, 30 years later, he revisits his memory of the event and realizes that he does not remember much of it, just isolated fragments. Meanwhile, the deeply buried guilt sends Ari on a painful journey of self-discovery, and leads him to interviewing his war veteran friends for possible clues to the horrifying mystery of the massacre.

This sequence of events is reflected in the film's metaphorical title Waltz with Bashir; Israel's alliance with the Phalange Party and its senior member Bashir Gemayel results in a bloodbath. Only someone as delusionally self-confident as Ari's friend Shmuel Frenkel, who sees the brutality of the war as a form of art as he is dancing with his machine gun while shooting the enemy, can believe that war is a smooth affair that always goes as planned. Contrary to Frenkel's belief, war often gets out of control.

Thirty years on, Ari still feels out of control as his recurring nightmares attest. His story is more of a katabasis (descent into the underworld) than a typical hero's journey. The unusual choice of style for the documentary (a sort of angular, jerky an