Word: bashir
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...Disney made Snow White, most animated features have followed the Disney mold: cute and colorful, with talking animals and a coming-of-age plot meant to inspire and amuse. Even a seeming exception like Persepolis found saving humor in its girl-grows-up story. Ari Forman's Waltz With Bashir is a break from all this: an animated documentary about the lingering, subterranean effects of war on the director and some old friends who had served in the Israeli Army during the 1982 incursion into Lebanon. The are still haunted by the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila...
Though the war was decades ago, and the combatants middle-Eastern, the issues the film raises are in no way provincial. Waltz With Bashir should touch all those who see it - both the vast majority who have been raised on gung-ho war movies, and the small minority who find that the truth is the opposite of the fiction. "It's like nothing you've seen in American movies," Forman has said. "No glam, no glory. Just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one they know, getting shot by no one they know, then going home and trying...
...lasting question is the effect of the Iraq occupation on U.S. soldiers. The dreadful nature of that conflict hasn't touched most Americans. Its troops alone bear the scar of war; they carry it home with them - if they come home - and those nightmares may never end. Waltz With Bashir is about the cold fingers of memory that clutch the heart. Forman's exemplary film says that only by exposing the wounds can they begin to heal. The message of the futility of war has rarely been painted with such bold strokes...
...authoritarian systems, dabbling first in state socialism before opting for political Islam and imposing Sharia law in parts of the country. Musicians were arrested and private parties at which bands played were broken up by Nimeiry's goons. Little changed when Nimeiry was ousted. In 1989, Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup. He was backed by Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist ideologue who invited Osama bin Laden to settle in Khartoum in the mid-1990s. But when al-Bashir signed a peace deal with Christian rebels in the south, allowing non-Muslims into the government...
...rebels are splintered into as many as 20 competing factions; groups of janjaweed militias, dissatisfied with the rewards promised by the government, are crossing sides to join their former enemies; and warring among all tribes has increased. Amid the chaos, the regime of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir continues its brutal crackdown, aggressively attacking rebel redoubts, indiscriminately killing civilians and razing entire villages...