(vis) The Protestant Film Jury in Germany has awarded “Waltz With Bashir” by Ari Folman Film of the Year 2008. Werner Schneider-Quindeau, president of the jury, presented the certificates to Anat Schwartz, member of the Bridget Folman Gang production team, and to Roman Paul from German co-producer Razor Films, at the award ceremony in the German Film Museum in Frankfurt/M on Friday, March 27. After the screening of the film they discussed with the jury’s vice president, Margrit Frölich, about the film’s production, its specifics and its reception by the Israeli public. At the beginning, jury member Jakob Hoffmann paid tribute to the aesthetic achievements of the prize winner. Jakob Hoffmann is member of INTERFILM and served among others at the INTERFILM jury at the Max Ophuels Prize Saarbruecken 2009. Here is the text of his eulogy:

"There are two kinds of documentary films: the good ones and the bad ones. The bad ones  luxuriate in the general assumption that documentary films supposedly show reality. The good ones refer to their approach, to their construction. On top of this, there are very few excellent films that obtain from this construction a unique form in its own right. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is one of these truly extraordinary films.

Nothing seems so far removed from reality than the animated film. With animated films we primarily associate the fairy tales produced by Walt Disney, that is perfect entertainment for young and old. When you now see WALTZ WITH BASHIR, you will have no trouble finding the form convincing: it immediately makes sense.  

The film’s point of departure is a dream. In dreams, subjectivity and history coincide. Dreams are attempts at integrating history into one’s individual biography. Nightmares indicate the failure of such an attempt at integration. In the film, the nightmare launches an investigation into the past. It is a battle through the psyche’s mechanisms of repression to the events that took place. The historical facts seem evident: we are dealing with the massacre of Sabra and Schatila (Lebanon) in 1982. The personal memory of the author, however, is cut off from this event; it needs to be reconstructed. The director Ari Folman attempts to accomplish this reconstruction by visiting his companions to ask them what they remember. 

In his review of the film, German film critic Georg Seesslen writes: „In the film’s form, history suspends itself ‚from below’. The powerful technological apparatus, which always maintains a residue of obscenity face to face with the real suffering of human beings within history, is replaced by the subversive power of the crayon. Here the autobiographical is now longer just an assertion. Because the stylization of the film moves far away from the „State of the Art“ of computerized animation in blockbuster films. Here we find images that reclaim memory from the ‚official reading’, from media hysteria.“

The brilliant exhibit „Superman and Golem – The Comic as Medium of Jewish Memory“ (that ended last Sunday in Frankfurt’s Jewish Museum) showed the rich tradition of confronting history by means of illustrated stories that exist in 20th-century Jewish culture. This is where Ari Folman’s animated documentray film has its roots. But it also attempts something new.

The Film of the Year is chosen from the twelve Film of the Month awards given by our jury during the past year. I quote from the jury’s motivation for awarding “Waltz with Bashir”: “When Ari Folman’s efforts to call in mind the past end, we are not only able to look at a specific historical crime with a new glance. In a radical and highly original way “Waltz with Bahsir” demonstrates how terror, fear and suppression combine. And: How morality and memory can be reinstalled.”

The German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, who was an expert on angels in the work of the painter Paul Klee, is buried in Port Bou at the French-Spanish border. In his memory the artist Dani Karavan has created a sculpture, which a pane of glass protects from the sea. On the pane is written: „Historical Construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.“ WALTZ WITH BASHIR is such a historical construction.

Jury President Werner Schneider-Quindeau with Anat Schwartz and Roman Paul