In 1982 Folman was a 20 year old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2006 he meets with a friend from the army service period, who tells him of the nightmares connected to his experiences from the 1982 Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find out that he does not remember a thing from the same period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre the reality of which he is unable to tell. In his memory he and his soldier friends are bathing at night at the seaside of Beirut to the light of flares descending over the city. Folman rushes off to meet another friend from his army service, who advises him to discuss it with other people who were in Beirut at the same time to understand what happened there and to relive his own memory. The film follows Folman in his conversations with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai who was in Beirut at the same time.

The movie takes its title from a scene in which one of the interviewees, the commander of Folman's infantry unit at the time of the film's events, grabs a heavy machine gun and "dances an insane waltz" amid heavy enemy fire, between walls hung with posters of Bashir Gemayel.

The movie explores how the young soldiers have dealt with their experiences of war. A psychologist is depicted advising Folman's character to compare his experience with that of his parents at the hands of soldiers during WWII. A sequence responding to this shows how Russian soldiers where shipped home long enough to kiss wives and mothers and immediately return to the front. The young Israeli soldiers return home on leave, albeit short, in the midst of life going on without them. These soldiers are not masters of their own destiny. They are shown as victims of the randomness of war. The "reversal of guilt" theme recurs as the narrator questions soldiers who were seemingly powerless to stop the massacre when they first realised what was happening. Several early sequences in the film show the haphazard effects of combat when combatants and civilians are inextricably mixed. This serves to polarise the issue of responsibility for the massacre later carried out in a calculated way.

The film is unusual in it being a documentary movie made by the means of animation. The film combines classical music, 1980's rock music, realistic graphics and surrealistic scenes together with illustrations similar to comics. Almost all the film was made by means of animation, except for a short segment at the end of the film which shows the documented results of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in a news archive footage.

An early dream sequence shows the image of the sea in maternal form. The sea in the film is calm, slightly undulating in slow motion. The film returns to the sea in the escape sequence when a young Israeli soldier escapes, after his tank is destroyed, by swimming out to sea at night and through chance being re-united with his unit. The vivid memory recalled by Folman's character, of young soldiers bathing naked in the sea at night as flares rain down on Beirut, also shows the sea in surreal colour, slow motion, and depicts the surface as a glassy undulating presence.

• Official Movie Web Site

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