Amid daily news “packages” on the recurrent onslaught of murder in Gaza, sits the regulation feature on the rising role of social media in modern conflict. The civilian on the street doubling as handheld eye-witness circumnavigating sponsored camera crews and editorial policies to give the world in-our-face, access-all-areas updates in real time.

Social media’s attack on sophisticated propaganda and news management is undoubtedly a phenomenon that tears up the rule book on war reporting. Even so, the experiences of those recruited for combat remain off-limits. The access-all-emotional-areas of those young men conscripted into forces defending their lands be it in fatigues or keffiyehs.

Most of us are veterans of watching war reports and war films, but few war veterans are reporters or filmmakers. Ari Folman is one. Conscripted into the IDF, he fought as a 19 year-old soldier in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His 2008 documentary film Waltz With Bashir recounts the experiences his young wet-behind-the-rifle squad shared on the front-line.

What sets the film apart from other talking head documentaries is the animation format through which these are captured. It enables the film to accommodate the unsettling hallucinatory and fractured quality of the memories of men from a time when they had barely crossed the threshold of adulthood. The wooziness, and the tricks memories play, toys with the viewer’s engagement immersing it in blurred interpretations. We’re kept guessing throughout. That the film was applauded by both supporters of the Israeli government and Palestinian liberation leaves sufficient ambiguity for soothing moral detachment as certainty.

But it’s not all detached reconstruction. The sudden shift to actual film footage in the closing minutes jolts the audience into the final inescapable confrontation between the soldier and his hitherto ambiguous flashbacks. Like the daily feeds down cables and phone cameras today, the footage screams for itself.