Hosted by Orly Yadin
Singularly blending animation with documentary, Waltz with Bashir is a mind-bending odyssey through painful memories, with an ending that will leave you speechless. One night, a friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare. They conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the 1982 Lebanon War.
SFGate wrote that “The whole movie seems like an acid trip—an Alice in Wonderland-ish dream for a post-9/11 world where war is a constant—and that’s the beauty of Waltz With Bashir. Folman’s work… allows the audience to enter a kind of forbidden zone where the characters’ fantasies seem as realistic as the deadly bullets they faced.”
The film is the second of a two-film series in animated histories presented by Orly Yadin, who wears several hats—award-winning filmmaker, film curator, educator. Before running VTIFF for 12 years, she taught documentary cinema, had her own production company that specialized in documentary animation, and also headed an archival footage company in London. She is now in production on a new documentary film.
As to the description of the film in paragraph one, Orly has one alteration: “It’s not a ‘blending’ of documentary and animation; the animation IS the documentary.”