Ari Folman’s Other War

This chapter looks at Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir within the context of the Holocaust. It recounts the 1980s and 1990s that marked the emergence of second-generation Israeli cinema that was specifically produced by the children of Holocaust survivors. It also reviews the second-generation Israel films that address the subject of war and critique the Zionist project, which intimates that it had simply replaced the trauma of the Holocaust with a new and different kind of Israeli trauma. It also mentions Ari Folman, a child of survivors, who began making films during the period of second-generation Israeli cinema. The chapter describes Waltz with Bashir as an example of second-generation film-making and as a film that explicitly deals with Lebanon, but implicitly engages with events of the Second World War. It analyzes the function of the Holocaust in greater detail within the context of Israeli cinema of the early millennium and the cinema of second-generation film-makers.