Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)

Ari looks at his picture taken twenty years ago in Beirut. Thin, wearing his uniform, with a crossed Galil, no beard, no white hairs, young. The city in the background, destroyed by the bombing. I do not recognize this, he admits. There's something wrong there. I can’t remember.

Experiment

They show four photographs to the subject, from his childhood, and ask him to tell everything he can remember of those times. One of the photographs, however, is a modified picture where the subject as a child appears mounted on an air balloon.

The event in the picture never happened but half of the subjects, at the end of the experiment, recall vividly the evening when they were seven years old and their fathers took them to ride the air balloon. Their sisters and their mothers on the ground saying goodbye, both wearing a hat, with long dresses. The trees. The river at the bottom. The cold. The smell of the flame that keeps the balloon in the air. The fear of falling.

The war remembered.

Remembering, then, is an exercise of invention. The war, over the years, is a painful and absurd comedy with no stars, no meaning, where a hot summer's trip becomes a horror of a shot in the neck, and music on one channel to abstract and diffuse what happens. That’s what it is about. See without seeing. That's it. Imagine that you see it behind a camera, says the journalist. Imagine that nothing is real and you are there. That is the secret.

Flares.

Flares in the sky over Beirut. Bleeding Fireballs. Beirut illuminated by its dry and slow explosions while they fall. Ari naked, submerged in the sea, watching the lights fall down. After getting dressed by the sea and walking between buildings. Ari on a street, surrounded by Palestinian women and children who were crying and screaming and raising their arms. Is that war? Is that it?

Collective Subconsious.

Ari talks to his battalion partners. He asks: What happened? They say: You really do not remember? Ari says: No. Neither the tanks, the rocket launchers or the children, nor the luxury yacht, or the red car that was impossible to stop, nor the immense woman who saved Ben-Yishai from the blast, or the night that Dayag spent between the sea submerged by the water trying to walk toward the lights, nor the Lazarov dance between bullets and the trance, firing the stolen MAC, or the fighting between the lemon groves, or the taste of blood in the mouth, the smell of it in the air mixed with gunpowder.

But it all comes back when they talk about it. Conjured by the words. Everything in depth is there, hidden, upset, embarrassed, resigned to be what it was.

Director: Ari Folman

Writer: Ari Folman

Stars: Ari Folman, Ron Ben-Yishai and Ronny Dayag