Waltz with Bashir is referenced in Linden MacIntyre’s most recent novel, The Only Café (Random House) and it is not hard to see how the film could be regarded as a companion piece to the book.

At this point, the animation gives way to actual footage of the slaughter's aftermath and its effect is extremely powerful.

With the assistance of one of his own recurring dreams, Folman is able to piece together what did happen when a Christian Phalangist militia committed these atrocities with the unwitting assistance of the Israelis, including his personal role in that massacre. The interviews became the film’s fulcrum as animated versions of likely very real people speak about their memories with Folman’s avatar. The animation is particularly effective in visualizing these fantasies. Folman seeks out friends and compatriots to interview who recall their experiences, which often bleed into fantasies of that surreal time. Both Folman and his friend are convinced that the dream is related to what happened in Beirut years earlier because the dreamer recounts how he killed twenty-six watchdogs during the war. This visceral nightmare is the opening scene in the film and the effect is electric and immediately engages the viewer. Folman was a nineteen-year-old Israeli soldier at the time and he repressed almost all memories of the events until, twenty years later, a friend recounted a recurring nightmare of a pack of ravenous, fanged dogs running through the streets of Tel Aviv before stopping at an apartment building and snarling up at a silhouetted figure in a window. Ari Folman’s animated 2008 quasi-documentary Waltz with Bashir is the filmmaker’s cinematic effort to address and perhaps atone for his complicity in the 1982 massacre of thirty-five hundred unarmed Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

The only café linden macintyre