Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir is a seminal entry into the canon of war films. Told from the very personal point of view of Folman himself, it is a ferociously honest exploration of the reliability of memory and the long-term impacts of violence on young soldiers.

In 1982, having sustained constant attacks from its neighbour, Israel invaded Lebanon. Soon after, Israeli soldiers, including Folman’s brigade, allowed Christian Phalangist militiamen to invade the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered. While not directly responsible for these heinous acts, the Israelis (mostly teenaged soldiers like Folman himself) tacitly assisted by sending up flares to illuminate the night sky and, many feel, by standing by and allowing them to occur.

The film’s opening sequence follows twenty-six wild and angry dogs as they run though a town, stopping to bay with rage under a man’s window. This scene is the recurring nightmare of one of Folman’s army comrades, and it is his dream that inspires Folman to search into his own past. While he knows that he participated in the war, Folman has virtually no memory of the events. He goes in search of his fellow soldiers, hoping that by collecting their memories he will be able to recreate his own. Twenty-five years after the conflict, Folman’s new recollections elicit unsettling residual feelings and perspectives, including an uncomfortable parallel between the massacre at the refugee camp and the Holocaust.

Folman has elevated the film’s impact by securing the extraordinary involvement of Yoni Goodman, who created astonishing animations of images originally shot on film. This visual approach elevates Waltz with Bashir beyond our jaded impressions of ever-present news footage and into the surreal terrain of image and memory. Folman does not delve into the politics of the conflict, choosing instead to subjectively explore a dark chapter in his (and Israel’s) life. His conclusion, made in the last few shocking moments of the film, is a tribute to the filmmaker’s own moral honesty and to generations of young people scarred by ungodly acts of war.

- Jane Schoettle, Toronto International Film Festival

The electric guitar has dominated popular music for the last half century. Anyone who has ever plugged into an amp understands its power. So does the average stadium crowd. But if you have too much exposure to amateurs, you might forget the incredible range of expression that the creation pioneered by Les Paul can achieve in the hands of masters. Director Davis Guggenheim, well-known for his Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, deepens our appreciation for going electric by bringing together three virtuosos from different generations: Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2 and Jack White of The White Stripes. It Might Get Loud weaves together their stories to reveal how each of them developed a unique sound. Unlike rock ‘n’ roll documentaries that focus on backstage drama, this one concentrates on the music, giving us intimate access to the creative process. What’s more, we see each musician play new work that has yet to be released. You don’t need to be an aficionado to enjoy the pleasure of this company. The film might not affect how you play, but it will change how you listen.

(Denver)

One of the leading lights of the Nouvelle Vague, director Agnès Varda once famously mused, “If you open people, you’ll find landscapes. If you open me, you’ll find beaches.” In this inventive, autobiographical, and eloquent memoir that coincides with her 80th birthday, Varda uses this framing device to explore her life as a child, an artist, a lover, and a mother. She remembers her childhood holiday trips to the seaside, and the family’s wartime exile to the fishing village of Sète, as carefree and sunny. Varda set her remarkable first feature La Pointe courte (1954) in Sète, and in one of Beaches’ loveliest moments, Varda stages a scene from her debut film involving two young boys. She tracks down the boys—now old men—who re-enact the scene while the original film is projected onto a makeshift screen. And Varda knew Tout le monde—from her compatriots in the French New Wave (including her husband Jacques Demy) to the Black Panthers in California. Weaving together photographs, vintage footage, and present-day sequences, Varda proves that her creative powers are undimmed with this fascinating portrait of a life lived to the fullest.

(SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix.

This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.Which side of the ideas war are you on?

(SXSW)

In December 2004, BBC World viewers tuned in to receive the surprising but welcome news that Dow Chemical was fully accepting responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal disaster, a toxic gas leak in which 18,000 people were killed. Even better, Dow spokesman ‘Jude Finisterra’ announced a $12-billion aid package for the people of Bhopal. The broadcast was seen by millions.

The Yes Men had struck again. Gonzo journalists, media pranksters, Swiftian satirists, the Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. They pose as corporate spokespersons, make uncanny replicas of company websites, and infamously published a spot-on parody of the New York Times. Among the headlines: “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights On Building Sane Economy.” It’s screwball nonfiction with a pointed purpose. Can they find a way to defeat the cult of greed and save civilization from its excesses? Yes, they can. Sean Farnel.

(HOT DOCS)

You are what you eat, the saying goes. But do you really KNOW what you eat? Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on the unsavory practices of our nation’s food industry. The film illustrates how the corporate purveyors of food products have literally gotten away with murder—and all with the complicity of our government’s regulatory agencies. As Kenner shows in detail, the food supply in the United States is controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit before health—not only of the consumers of their processed foodstuffs, but the economic health of farmers and food workers, and the health of the environment.

Drawing on the works of authors Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), Kenner’s film details the cozy relationship between agribusiness and government—a relationship that allows the corporate behemoth Monsanto to monopolize soybean production and litigate aggressively against small farmers who harvest their own seeds rather than buy Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds. Food, Inc. paints a vivid picture of the wages of unsustainable food production—obesity, diabetes, and E. COLI poisoning. But for all its outrage, Food, Inc. posits a hopeful (and delicious) future, highlighting a burgeoning organic farming movement that has made it all the way to the White House lawn.

(SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL)