Ari Folman

Folman with the cast of The Congress

The Congress is Ari Folman's first English language film. It has enabled Folman to work with the likes of Robin Wright off the back of the phenomenally successful House of Cards and represents a major step in the career of a director and screenwriter, who has for most of his career remained under the radar internationally, despite his success in Israel and the occupied territories.

Folman’s newfound fame comes from the success of Waltz with Bashir, a film lauded by critics across the world. It was a film which was included in the grand selection at Cannes, was nominated for the best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards, and went on to win a BAFTA award for film Not in the English Language.

The film drew attention from the media due to its controversial subject matter. The film deals  with the 1982 Lebanon War from the perspective of Folman himself, who was an infantry soldier in the Israeli defence forces at the age of nineteen and witnessed the aftermath of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, at the hands of the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia. This event is the heart of Waltz with Bashir as the documentary follows Folman as he tries to recapture his memories of the war, through a series of conversations with friends who served in the war with him, as well as other Israelis who were in Beirut during the conflict. The controversial subject matter of the film led to it being banned in Lebanon. Folman has described, in a recent interview in the Irish Times , that following the release of the film in Israel, there were those who thought by making the film he had  “betrayed” his “country”.

Waltz with Bashir

The controversy that surrounded  the film’s subject matter and particularly Folman’s personal involvement within the Lebanon war means that an intense political interest in the film is not likely to subside anytime soon, particularly given the current situation in Israel. Folman himself does not hold back on voicing his opinions on the Middle East and recently in the New York Times described how he “can’t understand war” going on to say “I can’t understand people killing each other for a piece of land.”

However, it was not simply the content of the film which ignited the critic’s passion, it was also the film’s adept use of hand drawn animation. Folman had previously used animation before in a documentary series called The Material That Love is Made of, a five hour series with five episodes, each episode opening with five minutes of animated documentary with scientists talking about the scientific aspects behind love. The use of animation in a feature length documentary film was unusual. In fact, arguably, Waltz with Bashir was the first feature length documentary to use animation.

Folman’s use of animation to convey to the audience the experience of war drew praise for not only how it visualised the memories of those who experienced the war but also the emotions attached to those memories. Waltz with Bashir sought to represent the unrepresentable scenes which could not be recreated authentically using live action. Roger Ebert described how the film evidenced the growing respect of the use of animation as a medium with which to address ‘series subjects’, with the ‘freedom of animation’ allowing him to truly visualize his and his friend’s memories and even their ‘nightmares’. Dan Jolin in Empire Magazine described how the use of animation never felt like a ‘novelty’ but was instead a key tool in the film’s storytelling, allowing the audience to experience warfare not just on a sensory level but also on the ‘subconscious: recollection, fever dream and an immediate experience all at once’. A poignant example of this is a powerful scene in which Folman hallucinates, imagining him and other Israeli soldiers rising out of the water, flares rising in the sky as he walks towards Lebanon his real memories mixing with the dream, as victims of massacre walk past him horrified.

The Congress

Given the success of animation in Waltz with Bashir it is not surprising that Folman should choose to return to the medium, even as he moves away from documentary and into fiction with The Congress. The film’s plot is certainly intriguing, inspired by The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem it follows an alternate version of Robin Wright, who signs a contract to the fictional Miramount studios, to give them her rights to scan her consciousness into a computer, and create fictional characters out of that consciousness. It offers the opportunity for Folman to break new ground and move away from his Israeli roots, to turn instead to a critique of Hollywood as it moves further into the digital age. In particular the idea of a studio wanting to acquire the rights to a person's identity in the digital world is, given the recent debates over the effect of the internet on copyright, piracy and privacy, an idea that is highly relevant. It also appears to be a perfect showcase for Folman’s skill at creating surrealist, dreamlike sequences, which made Waltz with Bashir such a powerful and evocative film. The Congress will open Folman to an entirely new audience, with a director of his sensitivity, ingenuity and invention this extra attention can only be a good thing. 

The Congress will be shown at Broadway Cinema from Friday 15 August to Thursday 28 August 2014.

The Congress