Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Animation seems an unlikely vehicle for documentary, but here it works brilliantly. It’s a remarkable, hallucinatory and deeply disturbing work, unlike any animated film you’ll have seen before: hand-drawn in a colourful comics style, it portrays Folman's struggle to recapture his lost memories of Israel's ill-fated 1980s war in Lebanon, when he was a young draftee. With no memories of his time in Lebanon (except that he knew he had seen combat and witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacres of September 1982, when pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen carried out a near-genocidal campaign of murder in two Palestinian refugee camps) he decided to try to cope with severe depression by contacting former military comrades, a psychiatrist friend and a neurologist who specializes in memory impairment. This is the extraordinary result, winner of the Audience Award at Warsaw IFF, and nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2008.