'Waltz With Bashir' leads down filmmaker's nightmare alley

ARI FOLMAN'S "Waltz With Bashir," which screens tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival, straddles many boundaries: between memory and dream, history and memoir, fact and fiction. Using animation to shift fluidly between frames, the movie investigates the Sept. 16, 1982, massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. Lebanese militiamen belonging to the Falangist Party, their passions inflamed by the assassination of the country's president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, slaughtered hundreds and possibly thousands of men, women and children, stacking their bodies in the narrow alleys between houses.

By Sam Adams, Special to The Times

September 4, 2008