Animated discussions

A brilliant Israeli film about the Sabra and Shatila massacre is bound to stir controversy, but for the moment it's the toast of Cannes

By John Harris
The Guardian

".........So it is that some superficially strange and not-uncontroversial films are making the running. The best example: Israeli director Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, in which - among other things - the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982 are examined via an inspired conceit: real-life testimony from Folman and other one-time Israeli servicemen combined with elegant, unbelievably affecting rotoscope animation.

Against all expectations, this technique brilliantly evokes the shock, guilt and almost surreal horror of what happened: young Israeli troops placed in a horrible moral twilight, as they were apparently ordered to allow Christian Phalangists to rape and slaughter the occupants of two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Any one of several elements in the film once again highlights the questions surrounding the soldiers role, though one in particular is pointed up to very unsettling effect: their use of flares to light up what was quickly revealed as a killing field. What the story doesn't cover is the outbreak of condemnation that greeted the events, the chasm of tension that suddenly erupted between the Israeli government and opinion abroad, and the huge upsurge of protest within Israel itself. The same goes for the subsequent Kahan Commission - which declared that not just that Israeli forces bore "indirect responsibility", but that the then defence minister Ariel Sharon's role made his culpability even more direct. The background to all this, meanwhile, was the decisive spread through Europe of that habit whereby Israel's more outrageous actions are routinely compared with those of Nazi Germany, long the focus (as Cif regulars won't need reminding) of one of the most highly-charged stand-offs between pro-Israelis and their critics.

The complex moral arithmetic of Sabra and Shatila makes Folman's allusions to Nazi-era Europe a little more nuanced, but he nonetheless dares to once again go there. The image of some of the camps' occupants being brought out at gunpoint, says the film, brought to mind that famous photograph of a Jewish boy being marched out of the Warsaw ghetto; one of the reasons the massacre caused such outrage in Israel, says one character, is because it so directly drilled back into the collective memory of the Holocaust ("For us Israelis, it was a direct connection to our Jewish history"). At both points in the film, one can almost hear the raw nerves being tweaked once again, outrage rippling through the chat-rooms, and the film's merits being lost in a cacophony of the usual shouting.

Here, though, is the important thing. Folman, who claims the film is "personal" rather than political, was there. In that context, and indeed the film's references to his own family's experience of Nazi genocide, will anyone argue with him? And if they do, what will they make of the fact that Israeli public money has helped finance Waltz With Bashir?"