The Congress

Ari Folman was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1962, to Polish parents who survived the Holocaust. After completing his military service in the mid-1980s, he set off on his long-dreamed-of journey around the world as a backpacker. After visiting two countries in just two weeks, however, he realized that traveling was not for him. He settled into a small guesthouse in Southeast Asia, where he continued to write letters to friends back home describing what seemed to be the perfect journey. Although he remained in the same place for an entire year, the experience of writing stories born of fantasy and imagination inspired him to return home and study filmmaking.

For his film school graduation project, Folman made the documentary Comfortably Numb (1991), which followed a close friend hiding in Tel Aviv and suffering from anxiety attacks during the First Gulf War as Iraqi missiles fell on the city. Both humorous and absurd, the film won Best Documentary at the Israeli Academy Awards. From 1991 to 1996, Folman directed documentary specials for Israeli television, focusing primarily on the occupied territories.

In 1996, he co-wrote and directed the feature film Saint Clara, based on a novel by Czech writer Pavel Kohout. The film won seven Israeli Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Film. It opened the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and went on to screen throughout the United States and Europe to critical acclaim.

Following a series of successful documentary projects, Folman released Made in Israel in 2001, a near-future fantasy about the pursuit of the last surviving Nazi war criminal. He has also worked extensively as a writer for Israeli television series. Among them is the award-winning BeTipul (In Treatment), a drama centered on a psychotherapist and his patients, which was later adapted by HBO into the television series In Treatment.

Folman first incorporated animation into the television series The Material That Love Is Made Of. Each episode opened with a five-minute animated documentary segment featuring scientists presenting their own theories on the evolution of love.

Building on the success of this experiment, Folman further developed the unique form of animated documentary in Waltz with Bashir (2008). Based on real events, the film follows his attempt to recover fragments of his own lost memories of the Lebanon War in the 1980s. For Folman, it was only natural that this personal journey of exploration should ultimately take the form of animation filled with imagination and fantasy.

Born in 1968 in Shizuoka prefecture. Originally a newspaper reporterand weekly magazine editor, Fujitsu started writing about animation in 2000. Fujitsu’s works include books such as "Anime Hyoronka Sengen – Revised Edition" (Chikuma Bunko), "Anime to Senso" (Nihon Hyoronsha), “Tomino Yoshiyuki Ron” (Chikumashobo). He serves as lecturer at Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Photo by Kaede Nakazato