Over the past quarter-century, the massacre’s horror has been absorbed and repressed within the Israeli mind, Folman suggests, but only partly. Like that movie, it is open to the objection that the overdog’s pain takes precedence over that of the oppressed, but this is a fascinating and often electrifying film in which Folman submits to his very own ‘Nam flashback’: a memory of how the Israel defence forces, of which he was a part, effectively presided over mass murder.
But his movie makes an acid-trip down memory lane, and Folman might have created his generation’s very own Apocalypse Now. LONDON: Has Israel made a mass, semi-conscious decision to forget about the Sabra and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war, in which Israeli forces allowed Christian Phalangist militia into Palestinian refugee camps to slaughter civilians? This extraordinary animated documentary by Israeli film-maker Ari Folman – a kind of fictionalised docu-autobiography – suggests that Israelis have indeed forgotten, in a kind of huge, willed amnesia.
