(2008; Hebrew) To the music of Max Richter, writer/director/ producer Ari Folman in this autobiographical, animated feature film interviews other former Israeli soldiers like himself who participated in the war in Lebanon in the early 1980s in an effort to retrieve his lost memories of the conflict, opening a Pandora's box into his soul's secret anguish.

After listening to Boaz Rein-Buskila (voice dubbed) in the winter of 2006, telling of his having a recurring dream of 26 wild dogs pursuing him - the same dogs he'd shot in Lebanon to silence the canines from barking an alert to Palestinian fugitives - Ari, who says he's never thought about his combat duty, experiences his first flashback to the war at a time when he was 19.

Relating his concern to his friend Ori Sivan, a psychologist, of having huge holes in his remembrance, Ori explains how the dynamic mind fills those gaps with its own inventions. Yet a haunting image persists, an event leading up to the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the validity of which Ari feels compelled to ascertain.

One of the young men appearing with him in his remembrance is Carmi Cha'an, whom he travels to see in Holland. At 18 with his youthful interests in math and chess, Carmi (voice dubbed), a retired and successful landowner, admits to having had uncertainty of his masculinity more than 20 years before on his way to Lebanon - aboard ship he dreamed of a beautiful, naked giantess rising from the sea, carrying him away from danger; but upon landing, he and the others with their two years of training began recklessly firing their weapons out of sheer fear, riddling a Mercedes, killing a family inside. Disappointingly Carmi, comparing combat with an LSD trip, denies being present in Ari's mental picture.

Afterward a flood of missing-in-action memories returns to Ari: riding in a tank, firing indiscriminately, and then tasked with transporting dead and wounded Israelis to helicopters.

Another comrade in arms, Ronny Dayag describes his guilt ("I didn't do enough") following being abandoned by his unit, the only survivor after his tank was destroyed, and swimming to safety.

"Was I there too?" Ari asks Schmuel Frenkel who waltzed in the street, firing at snipers above him in the tall buildings of Beirut, as TV journalist Ron Ben-Yishai strolled through the fusillade, nonchalantly reporting the firefight, accompanied by his cowering, crawling cameraman.

Post-trauma expert Professor Zahava Solomon explains to Ari - who says he can only remember his furloughs, contrasting normality with war - the psychological phenomenon of dissociative events and fractured reality. He finds out that Boaz was also in love with his girlfriend Yaeli, who'd dumped him just a week before he left for Lebanon.

From Dror Havazi's narrative Ari hears about how the Israelis watched as Lebanese civilians - women, children, and elderly men - were marched out of the refugee camps while the men (supposedly Palestinian terrorists) were being executed by the Christian Phalangists as revenge for the murder of their Lebanese president, Bashir Gemayel.

Another massacre in other camps some 40 years before the war with Lebanon has become associated with Ari's memories, too horrible to contemplate his involvement, which he has not been able to subconsciously reconcile.

"If … deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong [natural] selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced," biologist Robert Trivers noted: "Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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