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Jornal da Mostra
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31ª Mostra > 15/05/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, from Cannes, to ‘Jornal da Mostra’
ISRAELI ANIMATION RECREATES MASSACRES OF PALESTINES
After BLINDNESS, by Fernando Meirelles, the films set aside for all the Cannes’
selections for the first day painted the festival with the weight of dark colors.
The great shock was WALTZ WITH BASHIR, by Israeli Ari Folman. It is an animation
with documentary language, which sounds new in the infinite combinations possible
in cinema.
The filmmaker himself plays the character who wants to recover the memory he
traumatically lost when in the army, in the beginning of the 80’s, when
Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time. Little by little his memory recovers
the mosaic that goes as far as the back up which the Israeli army gave to the
Christian militia to invade the Palestine refugee camps of Sabra e Shatila and
indistinctly massacre whoever they met. Deal with such a taboo theme seems like
a terrible anniversary present for the 60 years of Israel.
Folman’s memories are those of a post-teenager soldier, who, as many in
his generation, went to Lebanon like someone who chooses a beach to spend the
next weekend. Reality, soon learned, was cruel and bloody confront, blind shots,
death of innocents on all sides. “The war experience, recreated as a cartoon”,
says the filmmaker, “has nothing to do with the glory we see in American
films. There is no glamour and no glory. Only youngsters going to places they
don’t know, shooting unknown ones, being the target of unknown ones, and
going back home to try to forget what they saw and did. And most of the times
they can’t.”
Cartoons for adults are a problem everywhere. Who is no longer a child thinks
he doesn’t have to go on watching animation films. But there are more
and more animations for adults. The corrosive cartoon against Iran PERSEPOLIS,
by Marjane Satrapi, revealed in Cannes last year, was a bitter failure in many
countries because of this stupid prejudice. Who knows Folman’s WALTZ will
help forming and provoking the curiosity of more adults for cartoons made especially
for them.
English version: Laura
Rebessi
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