It is gripping, painful, and lingers in the mind long after the credits roll. It tells a series of true stories, yet unspools like a hallucination. Waltz With Bashir is a documentary, yet it is animated. The result is one of the most extraordinary films of this or any year it is already bagging prizes across the world and building an Oscar buzz. There were vast gaps in his memory - and he became determined to fill them. Surely Folman had similar memories, similar flashbacks from Beirut? No, Folman realised. He had killed 26, and remembered every one of them. During the 1982 invasion, when an IDF unit tried to enter a village, their presence was often given away by the howling of dogs: Boaz, deemed too sensitive to kill a man, had been given the task of shooting any dogs on sight - to silence them in advance. The dream was connected to Lebanon, Boaz was certain. In a bar, the rain hammering outside, Boaz told Folman of a recurring nightmare: a pack of 26 vicious, slavering dogs stampede through a smart Tel Aviv street, upturning chairs, knocking over tables. I had the basic storyline, but there were large holes."Īround the same time, Folman got a call from a friend, Boaz Rein Buskila, a fellow conscript in 1982. "It's not that I had total amnesia about it," he says now, "but I had worked very hard to repress those memories. He realised that he had never spoken about the experience before.
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