Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir (2008) is Ari Folman's animated documentary, available to watch online on iFILM. The director realizes he remembers almost nothing of his own army service in Lebanon during the summer of 1982, and sets out to rebuild those lost months.

It starts with a friend's recurring nightmare: twenty-six rabid dogs chasing him through the dark, the exact number he once shot in an Arab village. That image cracks open Folman's own blank spot. He tracks down old comrades, a war reporter and a trauma psychologist, questioning each one as he edges toward the thing his mind keeps erasing, what he witnessed near the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Nearly the whole film is drawn, in fluid, uneasy animation where hallucination and sworn testimony blur into one. Then, at the end, the drawing abruptly stops. It took the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film and competed for an Oscar. Best for viewers ready for a hard reckoning with guilt and the way memory protects us by lying. Stream Waltz with Bashir (2008) online on iFILM.