Ari Folman remembers the day nearly four years ago when he walked on stage at a conference at Hot Docs, Toronto's annual international documentary film festival, to convince 40 television and film producers from around the world to back his new project, Waltz with Bashir. The subject of the film was controversial: Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982 and the Israeli army's role in the infamous massacre of Palestinian civilians at two refugee camps in Beirut.
But the filmmaker realised it was another aspect of the film that was difficult - the fact he wanted to make it as an animated documentary. 'Thirty-eight out of the 40 people said, 'It's a nice story - but why animation?',' says Folman. 'Look how narrow-minded the film industry can get. [If it's a] story about a soldier trying to regain his wartime memories, no problem. Videos of massacres at the end? Horrible pictures? No problem with that, too. Do whatever you like. But animated real people? No, no, no.' One of the two who didn't question his premise put some money into the project.
Opening at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Waltz with Bashir is one of the most remarkable films ever made about that war, if not about war in general. It unfolds as both a documentary, with interviews, and a hallucinatory trip, with former soldiers' experiences presented in animated fantasy sequences.
Having won the best foreign language film award at the Golden Globes last month, Waltz with Bashir is favoured to win the same title at the Academy Awards (tomorrow Hong Kong time).
A firm believer that 'war has no glory', Folman admits he was inspired by films which use surreal imagery to lampoon the absurdity of war. Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, for instance, is one of his reference points, as is the surfing scene in Apocalypse Now.
Folman's tribute to that happens at the end of his film. After a long shootout around a deserted junction in Beirut, an apparently deranged Israeli soldier grabs a weapon, jumps into the centre of the road and begins to shoot randomly at buildings around him, all of which bear vast portraits of Bashir Gemayel, leader of Lebanon's Christian militia and the new president-elect. The spray of gunfire at Gemayel's likeness alludes to what follows, when the politician's assassination leads to Phalangist militiamen heading into the Sabra and Shantila refugee camps and slaughtering more than 3,000 Palestinian men, women and children.
While the massacre was taking place in the camps, scores of Israeli soldiers were stationed around their perimeters, shooting flares into the night sky and blocking the exits. Among those who were there was the then 19-year-old Folman, who says he didn't know what was going on inside the camps as he stood guard outside. He realised what happened soon afterwards - it would have been hard not to, given that 400,000 Israelis soon took to the streets of Tel Aviv to condemn the actions of their military. But he never thought about the episode again, nor his other experiences in Beirut.
