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

If Al Gore invented the Internet, dot-com millionaire Josh Harris embodied it. As a lonely child, his personality was shaped by TV — he loved Gilligan more than his mother. “I’ve been programmed by someone else’s dream,” he says, and the ’90s web boom gave him the cash, power and audience to share his public isolation. Before ‘Survivor’, he crammed 100 extroverts into a Manhattan warehouse and recorded the chaos; he celebrated his first girlfriend by lining their loft with cameras and streaming their life online. Broke and humiliated by 2001, he eventually unplugged his web cams and vanished.

Director Ondi Timoner uses Harris’ astonishing rise and crash to plug into the white noise of communal voyeurism that Harris predicted a decade before Twitter. When nothing is private, nothing is special — a lesson Timoner learned firsthand in a Harris experiment which ended in guns, tears, and rote orgies. This disturbing documentary argues that, like Harris, we’re headed for a breakdown on a mass scale as we realize his warning that “Big Brother isn’t a person. It’s a collective consciousness.”

(LAFF)

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)

Martin Strel is not your average world-class athlete. He is overweight, possibly alcoholic and suffering from high blood pressure. Unbelievably, he is a four-time world record-holding endurance swimmer and a hero in his homeland of Slovenia. Strel swims some of the most dangerous rivers in the world (including the Mississippi and the Yangtze) to raise awareness of the effects of pollution. At 53, he is about to take on his greatest challenge to date, the mighty Amazon.

With a crew as eccentric as himself (including an amateur river navigator who makes increasingly bizarre comparisons between Strel and Jesus), Martin sets off to swim 3,375 miles over 66 days, for history’s longest swim. As the unlikely team progresses down the river, Strel quickly shows signs of mental and physical deteroriation. His own son fears that his father is going insane as it becomes increasingly clear that it is not pollution that Strel is battling, but his own inner demons.

Blurring the line between reality and myth, documentary filmmaker John Maringouin creates a darkly humorous portrait of an extraordinary individual you won’t soon forget.

(ATLANTIC FILM FESTIVAL)

Flipper was one of the most beloved television characters of all time. But ironically, the fascination with dolphins that he caused created a tragic epidemic that has threatened their existence and become a multibillion dollar industry. The largest supplier of dolphins in the world is located in the picturesque town of Taijii, Japan. But the town has a dark, horrifying secret that it doesn’t want the rest of the world to know. There are guards patrolling the cove, where the dolphin capturing takes place, who prevent any photography. The only way to stop the evil acts of this company and the town that protects it is to expose them….and that’s exactly what the brave group of activists in The Cove intend to do.

Armed with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, the members of the small group, led by the most famous dolphin trainer in the world, devise a covert plan to infiltrate the cove to document the horrifying events that happen there. Along the way, they uncover what may be the largest health crisis facing our planet— the poisoning of our seas. Part environmental documentary, part horror film, part spy thriller, The Cove is as suspenseful as it is enlightening. The final result is a heart-wrenching, but inspirational, story that shows the true power of film in the hands of people who aren’t afraid to risk everything for a vital cause.

(FROM SUNDANCE FF)

OCTOBER COUNTRY is a haunting multi-generational story of a working-class family coping with poverty, teen pregnancy, foster care and the ineffable horrors of child molestation and war. A co-directing effort by filmmaker Michael Palmieri and photographer and writer Donal Mosher, it follows Donal’s family in Herkimer, New York from one Halloween to the next, resulting in a beautifully crafted film remarkable for its intimacy, sensitivity and textured portrait of a family in crisis that has become all too familiar, if not representative, of America’s poor.

Who are the Moshers? Don, the emotionally remote and dry-witted head of the family, returned from Vietnam plagued by nightmares about his dead friends and admits he’s an ass who takes a hard line on foolishness. Dottie, his intrepid and eternally optimistic wife, forms the emotional glue for the family. Don’s estranged sister, Denise, is a practicing witch and a lifelong outsider who takes us to the cemetery she frequents to meet her ghost friends. Don and Dottie’s daughter, Donna, grew up too fast, picked men who beat her and gave birth to Daneal as a teen. Daneal also had a teenage pregnancy with a man who beat her and is ill-equipped to care for the toddler now that they have divorced. Donna’s youngest daughter, Desi, is a clever girl who is aware of the bad examples set by her sister and mother. She just might avoid repeating their mistakes and thereby overcome her own tragic history. As the Mosher family does their best to grapple with their lives, circumstances and decisions, we root for them—especially Desi, who holds such promise.

(FROM SILVERDOCS)