1. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman , 2008)
These opening five minutes are among the most outstanding in film. In voiceover, a man tells Folman that he has been suffering from a recurring dream in which twenty-six wild dogs rampage through the streets but suddenly stop, as though entranced, directly below his apartment. He says the number of dogs is always the same, and worse still, he knows exactly why. It links back to a memory from 1982, when the two men served in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Folman is surprised to find that he remembers nothing of this time. And so, to gain a better understanding of his own experiences, he interviews former comrades, a psychologist friend and a TV news reporter who had been stationed in Beirut during the war. The only image he can muster becomes a regular vision throughout the film; he and his fellow soldiers emerging from the sea as flares illuminate the night sky. These sequences, half-forgotten as though a dream, are interspersed with hallucinatory, and often harrowing, effect. For example, proving that the film certainly doesnt shy away from the chaos of war, a destructive (although darkly comic) montage shows a regiment being picked off one by one by a series of car bombs, tank shells and sniper fire. Indeed, death is routinely shown to be a grim punchline. This is contrasted with the image of Folman adrift on the torso of a giant naked woman, as though escaping reality to retreat in a dream world. But once he is reminded of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Folman realises that his amnesia is in fact a coping mechanism. At this point, just as he has been shielded from the truth, and we have been sheltered behind animation (after all, no one really gets hurt in cartoons), the film abruptly switches to real-life footage of the massacres aftermath. Far more than a final flourish, this presence of a camera at last reminds us that we are watching reality, revisiting history, and are forced to accept such a dramatic and devastating ending. Only a documentary could be this powerful. Are there any classic docs we missed? Let us know in the comments below.