While on Baha'i pilgrimage in the summer of 1979, we were swimming in the Sea of Galilee one peaceful afternoon. Blue skies with few clouds overhead. Suddenly thunder roared nearby.  Strange sounds on such a clear, sunny day. Later in Haifa, we noticed large battleships prowling the harbor but thought this must be standard practice in Israel—where it wasn't unusual to board a bus and sit next to a machine gun toting Israeli soldier.

Not until landing back in the states and reading Time magazine did I discover that Israel had been dropping bombs on Lebanon—some 50 miles from where we had been swimming. This was just a few years before the official “war” began but clearly demonstrated to me how different news and history can be from living in the middle of the real situation.

Such is the case with filmmaker Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. History has been scribed on the first Lebanon War, but that simply cannot refect the experiences of the participants. That is Maoz's mission as he fashions a claustrophobic Das Boot scenario inside an Israeli tank with its crew of four striving to survive.

Opening in a field of sunflowers, we are plunged into a 90 minute roller coaster mission of uncertainty. So close are the quarters that we never see full body shots of the four very human soldiers: a commander (hesitant to take charge), a gunner (reluctant to take lives), a driver (afraid to disregard the broken instrument panel), and a loader (who complains about his duties).

Initially it feels like absurdist drama along the lines of Sartre's No Exit or Beckett's Waiting for Godot while the four soldiers await orders. Then the mission arrives, carried by an unflappable officer who abruptly lowers himself into the tank before extracting himself just as quickly. His orders are not to be questioned, and we witness the catastrophic consequences when the gunner fails to follow his command to shoot an oncoming vehicle. 

Termed "Rino" by outside forces, we're encased inside the tank for virtually the entire film--the main view of the outside coming from peering through the crosshairs of the tank's periscope. Besides the officer a limited number of outsiders come through the top hatch--a dead comrade for subsequent helicopter pickup, a Syrian captive, a creepy Arabic collaborator. But mostly we view the outside happenings via the scope, and everything seems in relative control while only able to observe the mission officer.

It's not until we are allowed to overhear the officer radio his superiors that we (and the tank's commander) understand his humanity and realize the real peril that the four men inside the tank really face. 

The filmmaker paints war's chaos impressionistically through bursts of sound and light and disjointed camera angles, powerfully portraying the helplessness in such an absurd setting. Filmmaker Maoz served as a young gunner in the 1982 war, yet the potency of his film rests in the absence of specifics and political background. It's the sheer terror and uncertainty that count--the soldiers don't know where they are, who their allies and enemies are, or have any idea of the overall mission. It's a struggle to survive a real Hell.

Maoz draws upon that traumatic experience for Lebanon and creates one of the most personal and universal war films in recent memory.