A NEW fortnightly film night hosted by the One World Centre will start at the Java Café, Douglas, tonight (Friday) at 7.30pm.
This evening's event will see the screening of Waltz with Bashir which reflects on filmmaker Ari Folman's time spent in the Israeli army.
It is a profoundly moving antiwar meditation that is equal parts personal memoir, history lesson, and animate
d fever dream.
In 1982, Folman was a soldier during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon.
This was a painful moment in history, when the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was killed in an explosion. Furious, his party, the Christian Phalangists, retaliated by storming into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and killing thousands of innocent victims.
More than 20 years later, Folman is disturbed to realise that he has no memory of this incident even though he was there at the time. In order to remember, he tracks down several of his friends and soldiers who were there with him to find out what really happened.
Waltz with Bashir has been described as difficult to categorise as it is to forget, 'a truly startling achievement, a film that can be classified as animation and documentary and history and fiction. It is all of those things at once, and it is also much more than that'.
Folman uses a combination of Flash animation, 3D, and classic animation to bring his film to visual life, but it is the beautifully haunting score by acclaimed German composer Max Richter that provides the film with its heart and soul.
