Israeli Director Eyes Top Cannes Prize
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Director Ari Folman couldn’t take his plane back to Israel as planned. He had to stay longer at the Cannes Film Festival because of the intense interest in his animated documentary, “Waltz With Bashir.”
“It’s unbelievable to be here,” he told The Shmooze. “We had no clue where we were going with the movie.”
Now one of the buzzed-about favorites for the Palme d’Or, Cannes’s top prize, “Waltz With Bashir” chronicles — in cartoon form — Israel’s 1982 war against Lebanon. The title refers to the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, which led to the massacres in Sabra and Shatila.
“Waltz With Bashir” continues a Cannes trend that began last year with “Persepolis,” another work that highlighted the horrors of war through animation.
Folman embraced the idea years ago. “There is no other way to make the film,” he said.
Folman was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier during the 1982 conflict, and he said that his memories of it dissipated as the decades rolled by.
When a friend who was a veteran of the war kept having the same nightmare night after night, Folman decided to dig into his own subconscious, with the help of soldiers who fought with him. In the film, he travels the world to interview these soldiers while trying to reconstruct the true events of his own combat experience. But he said he didn’t want to tell the story by showing men in their 40s talking in front of a camera. Sketched moving images let him go much further, while providing an emotional buffer.
“I grew up in a private school in Haifa, disconnected from the Israeli society in many ways, and then I joined the army in a very rough unit,” he explained.
Beyond the magnificent images and music, Folman, the father of three young boys, said he is conveying a simple message: “All war is useless.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
