During the first Lebanon War in 1982, film-maker Ari Folman served with the Israel Defense Force in Beirut. More than 25 years later, an encounter with a troubled former comrade stirs repressed memories of his tour of duty and prompts him to interview the men he fought alongside. Presenting the live-action footage of meetings as a mix of Flash animation and 3D, the film's seductive visuals give the resulting war stories a surreal edge in which guilt and post-traumatic stress intertwine in hallucinatory ways. For all its talk of dreams and memory, though, the heart of this powerful documentary concerns a very real war crime: the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian militia gunmen. Instead of excusing the Israeli Army's role in the atrocity, Folman offers a harrowing portrait of a generation of young soldiers forever scarred by the horrors of war.

An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.