This animated film depicts director Ari Folman’s search for lost memories of his experience as an Israeli soldier during the 1982 Lebanon War. Framed as an exercise in therapy, it consists of a series of interviews with his former comrades. As more memories come to the surface, Ari realises that his unit played a role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and that his forgetting was a defence mechanism to avoid confronting this.

The film received wide acclaim from critics and audiences alike, with particular praise given to its themes, animation, direction, story, and editing. The animation uses a unique technique invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel: a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation.

‘Painting each frame of Waltz With Bashir took almost four years and many doubted it could be done. But there is no question that the result is one of the most resonant films of its year from any source, and quite probably a landmark in animation. It combines hallucinatory dreamscapes, the horrors of hard truth and a natural beauty of expression that has not often been matched before.’ Derek Malcolm, London Evening Standard