Starring: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Laz
Can’t films be therapeutic? Director-protagonist Ari Folman asks Ori (his film-making partner and friend) within the first five minutes of Waltz with Bashir. I don’t recall if he ever gets an answer. Waltz is a foreign-language animated film. But one with very little resemblance to Snow White; a surreal painting crossed with a graphic war novel is much closer. An aid to further understanding of the psychic damage of war is even closer.
Folman fought in the 1982 Lebanon war as a 19-year old. In 2006, he meets an old comrade, Boaz Rein, who has been having nightmares about the war. Folman realises that he remembers nothing about the war, least of all the massacre at the Lebanese cities of Sabra and Shatila, where he played a part. He sets out to talk to old friends who have their own versions of the same time. He meets Carmi, who had the brains to be nuclear physicist, but now lives in Holland smoking joints; his former commander has taken up martial arts; a third comrade still hasn’t recovered from the trauma.