Waltz with Bashir: The Response from Lebanon

Waltz with Bashir has spurred a lot of conversation in the U.S., but some of the best insight into the historical events it portrays comes from Lebanon, where the movie is set. The movie pieces together different people's memories of the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians at a refugee camp in Beirut.

While I've read quite a couple reviews of the film by the U.S. news media (I wanted to learn more about the film after seeing it at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri), none of the U.S. reviews I've read could give as much perspective as this article reported from Lebanon in GlobalPost a couple weeks ago. U.S. movie reviewers are not typically experts on this historical subject, so they glossed over the historical angle to discuss the surrealist animation and artistic aspects of the film. I found the GlobalPost article more interesting, because it shows the film in the context of a society where the massacre's political and social implications are still very present.

I hadn't known that the film was banned in the country where it is set; it was interesting to learn about the underground theaters flooded with people coming to see it. The reporter does a good job of presenting a wide array of opinions on the controversial topic, although it is hard to tell from the story how widespread each opinion is, or whether they have roughly equal numbers of adherents.

I found it especially interesting that one viewer called parts of the film Israeli propaganda, since I had come away from the film thinking that is was pretty strongly condemnatory of the Israeli officials who had turned a blind eye to the massacre. He explained that the movie ignored what he perceived as continuing massacres by the Israelis in 2006 and this year. I wonder what Israeli audiences thought of the film.

The role that women play in the movie is also interesting to note. It's a surprisingly small role, even by war film standards. There is a token girlfriend who has two lines of dialogue, a blue, sexy goddess from a dream and a group of wailing women at the end. Since the whole film is filtered through the consciousnesses of the main characters (all men), I wonder how much of this is the men's point of view, how much is objective reality. I know the women didn't fight, but were they of any use at all?