Waltz with Bashir by film director Ari Folman and artistic director David Polonsky

“Waltz with Bashir” is an Israeli animated documentary film which took four years to make. It was released in 2008 and made into a graphic novel in 2009. We have both the book and the DVD. Since I watched the DVD before reading the book, it was difficult for me to evaluate the merits of the book by itself. The book is a fairly seamless adaptation of the movie, so it mostly served to remind me of how I experienced the film. Although the shots in the book are chosen with care, the bleakness and the violence portrayed have a greater impact in the movie then from the book’s pages.

Ari Folman started working on the film after a friend who had served in the Israeli army brought to his attention a recurrent nightmare he had that stemmed from his wartime experience. Folman realized that he himself had blocked out memories from his own time in the military. He then began dreaming of himself emerging on a beach with two other young soldiers, going forward to encounter streams of women and children, all in great distress. Because he couldn’t remember where this dream came from, he began to talk to others who served with him. Eventually the scenario of a particular event emerged, a 1982 massacre by Lebanese Christian Phalangist soldiers of residents in two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.

War had been going on in Lebanon since 1975. Many Palestinians lived in Lebanon and some of them waged war on Israel from Lebanese territory. Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, seeking to wage war on the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), with the support of the Lebanese government. Eventually Israel forces controlled Beirut, and they agreed in September to let the Lebanese Christian Phalangist forces enter the two camps in West Beirut, ostensibly to flush out PLO fighters. Instead of which the Lebanese soldiers killed, raped and mutilated men, women and children for three days, while Israeli forces provided light by shooting flares and kept residents from fleeing the camps.

The film has won numerous awards and accolades for both the director and the artistic director. It shows the fighting from the young soldiers’ viewpoint - how they fire because they are told to fire, and because they are afraid. The film has been faulted for indirectly slighting or minimizing the massacres by focusing on what it meant for the Israeli soldiers to be part of the killings, without full knowledge or consent. What is interesting in the political fallout is that some higher ups in the Israeli army were removed from their commands as a result of their collaboration in the massacre, but no Christian Phalangist soldiers were ever charged with their crimes. Ari Folman simply terms his film as “anti-war”; and as an exercise into how horrific events can go unacknowledged even when people see them with their own eyes.

The film shows us the cruelty, the wantonness of war, and how combatants try to protect themselves by blocking out events. But this specific war has specific circumstances. How people live with unsafe borders, how soldiers deal with being fired on by 13-year olds, how displaced people wait for liberation and a job… “Waltz with Bashir” raises more issues then it can deal with. Ari Folman, in a BBC interview, comments sardonically that Israel has had no issues with the film and its depiction of events. This may be because while we see the bodies, and hear the wailing of those left alive, there is no real unearthing of what happened, of how this ferocity was unleashed.

The Cellist of Saravejo by Steven Galloway

Steven Galloway is a Canadian writer whose third book, "The Cellist of Saravejo", has become an international best seller, not without some controversy. While the setting of the book is clearly portrayed as being Saravejo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the author assures us in a preface, that “this is above all else a work of fiction.” Galloway, however, does want to connect readers with the historic siege of Sarajevo, which took place from 1992 to 1996. During the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was targeted by the Serbian army, who feared encroachment and domination by Croats, the other primary nationality living in that region. The Serbian forces rained down death and destruction on Sarajevo, effectively blocking the city and exposing inhabitants to starvation and disease, as well as inflicting rape and torture.

There have been atrocities on all sides in the Balkan conflict, but the Serbian nationalist profile is one that emerges as the most horrendous, as witness their leaders now being tried in The Hague for war crimes. Galloway describes the lives of four city residents in prose that is precise and meant to be impersonal, giving us a birds-eye view of each person’s reflections and how they adapt to survive. Galloway takes pains to show how each person struggles with living in a war. His characters find themselves losing compassion, direction, and hope. Then an act of bravery, charity, or love revives them, and they remember who they are and why they should care about other people. The main action that inspires them in this book is a cellist who plays in the street, mourning the victims.

What is interesting is that the cellist of Sarajevo was a real person, Vedran Smailovic, who is now living in Ireland. He is outraged by Galloway’s use of his character as the symbol for hope in his book. The cellist in the book plays every day for 22 days (at the same time) as a tribute to 22 people killed while standing in line for bread. Smailovic says that he played for two years, not just 22 days, and was not so stupid not to vary his times playing, to make a harder target for the snipers.

Galloway does not explore the racial hatred in Bosnia and Herzegovina, preferring to emphasize our common humanity. But this idealizing of life without war wears somewhat thin as the novel goes on. War is never simple, yet Galloway tries to make it so, by stripping characters of their racial identity and assuming that to kill anyone is just a mistake that people fall into. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" uses historical events as the impetus behind its story, but, in my view, fails to illuminate them.

Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir, with Damien Lewis

Published last year, this is a personal account of the sufferings being undergone in Sudan in Africa during their civil war. Two different groups have long uneasily shared this land - nomadic Arabs, a minority with power, and the black tribes. Traditionally sparring for land in times of drought, periodic uprisings from the black community against the Muslim government in 2004 brought violent reprisal by Arab militants against black villages. This reprisal was sponsored by the government and fueled by racial hatred. Rape and brutal killings abounded, and Halima relates her experience of this genocide. The first half of the book tells about her childhood in the village and illuminates their traditions. Some are good, as her grandmother’s knowledge of healing herbs, and some are bad, such as the cutting and sewing of the girls’ genitals when they are eight years old. Halima’s father is a prosperous citizen and sends her to boarding school in the nearest town, where she begins to learn of the hostility between the Arabs and the blacks. As she conquers one obstacle after another in her education, political events unfold so that the horrors take place in an atmosphere already fearful and apprehensive. Her father wants to run to Chad, but her mom and grandmother want to stay, not leave their homeland. But the father knew better. Halima and her co-writer show us again how knowing what could happen does not reduce our helplessness in the face of civil disaster.