CANNES: Israel’s Ari Folman, in Cannes to premiere his fiercely anti-war animation “Waltz With Bashir”, says his country is awash with ex-soldiers like himself who have repressed horrific memories of their time in the Israeli army.

“A world expert on post-trauma I interviewed in the film told me that in Israel there are thousands of walking bombs,” he said in an interview, saying that the country was suffering from a “collective amnesia”. “People, ex-soldiers who can live their lives, nothing happening, everything’s cool, but one day they could just burst out and you will never know what will happen,” he said.

“Waltz With Bashir”, the Cannes film festival’s first ever fully-animated documentary, deals with repressed memories, the horrors of war and Israel’s dubious role in a notorious 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in a camp in Beirut.

The highly personal tale recounts Folman’s quest to fill the holes in his memory of his stint as a 19-year-old conscript in Israel’s army. It ends with him realising he was one of the many Israeli soldiers positioned around the camp but who did nothing to stop the massacre by a Christian militia.

When he got back to Israel, he blocked it all out of his mind, he said as he sat in a Cannes beachside cafe just before his movie’s premiere at the glitzy festival where it is competing with 21 other films for the Palm d’Or top prize.

“I never talked about my army service. I got on with my life without talking about it, without thinking about it. It was like something I didn’t want to be connected with whatsoever.” But a series of events 20 years later led the now 45-year-old filmmaker to realise he couldn’t even remember any more what he had experienced.

He decided to find out. The result was “Waltz With Bashir”, in which he tracks down old friends and others who were with him in Lebanon.

But why did he decide to turn these interviews into animation?

“There is memory loss, memory recovery, dreams, hallucinations, sub-conscience, conscience how on earth could you combine these things differently except doing it with animation?” he said.

Animation, he added, will also help the film reach a wider and younger audience around the world but particularly in Israel.

“I hope young people will watch this film, I hope they might be moved by the animation, the music, and I hope it might help them see that war is really is about them just being used as pawns by other people,” he said.

His film is about the early 1980s, when Israelis were fighting in Lebanon.

Today, they are fighting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Has anything changed for young Israelis, who have to do obligatory military service?

“The change is not in the political aspect but in a personal aspect. I think now people are more aware, there’s much more criticism, there are much more people who refuse to take part in the occupation,” he said.

He said he hoped his own three small children would not have to fight when they reach 18, but he is not optimistic.

“With the kind of (political) leaders we have now there’s no future. But if the leadership changes we might have hope,” he said.

The wider context of Israel’s war in Lebanon is not dealt with in the film, but Folman’s movie is a clear indictment of the Jewish state’s military and political conduct.

He said he would be delighted if “Waltz With Bashir” got released in Arab countries, which always shun Israeli films.

“Our sales people got an approach from Dubai Film Festival. I would love to see it screened in an Arab country. This would be a dream come true,” he said.—AFP