Oscars 2009: Meet the Nominees You’ve Never Heard Of

3. ARI FOLMAN
Best Foreign Film
Waltz With Bashir

He might win an Oscar for … bringing us into his trippy, groundbreaking, animated personal documentary of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut by the Lebanese Christian militia led by Bashir Gemayel. Wrapped-up in a powerful, funky ‘80s-inflected soundtrack, Waltz makes this foreign war, which should feel uncivilized, feel all the more relative, accessible — and fueled by misguided youth. It’s so powerful that has been banned in the very country it takes place: Lebanon.

He holds his own … with critics such as Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers who warns, “Watch and learn, cynics, even if you think animation is strictly for kung-fu pandas and you know squat about assassinated Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. For what’s on view in Ari Folman‘s Waltz with Bashir … is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war … Get ready to be knocked for a loop.”

You should know that … Waltz is not just a war documentary but a personal journey. The story is told through the eyes of Folman, who was an Israeli foot soldier during the Beirut invasion. Twenty-six years later, his memory is reignited when a friend talks to him about repeated nightmares of his time during the war. Then what begins as spotty, disjoint memories returns bit by bit to Folman’s consciousness, with the help of his real-life friends and associates who were active participants of the bloody Lebanon war and who also have gaps in their memories.

It’s all based on the recorded interviews of Folman and his friends – but the interviews have been animated and enhanced with animated flashback dramatizations of these real-life life events, The result is an investigative documentary/mystery, reconstructing these combined memories. 

Folman was born in Haifa, Israel, to Auschwitz survivors — who often themselves get caught-up in a cycle of compartmentalization, denial, acting-out and reinvention, as they process their tortured memories. So it’s no surprise to learn, years later, that Folman would attribute some of his ability to block out tragic events to his upbringing in that environment.

As a teen, he volunteered for the Israeli army, where he worked mostly as a writer for training and information films. However in 1982, at age 19, writing changed to combat as he was sent to the Lebanon War. There, he witnessed the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians at the hands of the Lebanese militia aided by Israeli defense forces to descend upon refugee camps. He was one of many complicit Israelis, and the traumatic effect would take decades for Folman to fully comprehend, as Waltz illustrates.

In the mid 1980s, after completing his military service, he ventured out on his dream trip to travel the world with a backpack. Just two weeks and two countries into the trip, he realized he was done and settled into small guesthouses in Southeast Asia, writing letters to his friends at home in Israel; letters in which he totally fabricated the perfect trip. A year of being in one place and writing down the products of his fantastical imagination convinced the young scribe to return home and study cinema.

His feature debut, Saint Clara, was in 1996; it told the story of a young Israeli girl whose psychic powers wreak utter havoc with the residents of her small village and her love life. The film swept Ophir Awards, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars. That led to a series of successful documentaries and a writing job on the acclaimed drama series Shabatot VeHagim. He took time off for his second feature in 2001, Made in Israel — a futuristic fantasy that centers upon the pursuit of the world’s only remaining Nazi.
 
In 2003, at the risk of being unpatriotic, Folman ended his long military association with the Israeli Army. After which it was suggested that he seek counseling to deal with some of the incidents he had witnessed, that were apparently haunting him.

The following year he first attempted animation in his series, The Material that Love is Made Of. Each episode opens with five minutes of documentary animation, depicting scientists presenting their theories on the evolution of love. This well-received attempt at storytelling propelled Folman to develop the unique Waltz format.

He then earned an award with a 2006 series for which he wrote, Be Tipul (In Therapy) that centers on the indoor/outdoor life of a therapist and later inspired the new HBO drama series In Treatment.
 
He confesses … that his presentation of the accounts of others is more than him taking “liberties” with the stories that were shared with him; it was “interpretation.” As he told the Huffington Post, “When someone tells you his dream that a giant woman is rising out of the water and she’s naked and she takes him and they make love in the sea, you don’t ask too much questions. You take the story and you interpret it into your mind and you give the colors … And you feel the freedom to do it because you can’t get in someone else’s brain.”

He’s unstoppable … Next stop for Folman: a fictional adaptation, blending live action and animation, of what he says is his favorite book, The Futurological Congress, by Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris, which became an epic Russian film and then a George Clooney movie. Fittingly, the story reveals a world controlled by psychopharmalogical drugs companies and their mind-altering chemicals. 

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