Films that depict combat as heroic, thrilling or comical are a pernicious and irresponsible misrepresentation of the truth, according to the director of the year’s most acclaimed war film.

Samuel Maoz’s claustrophobic drama Lebanon won the Golden Lion, the top award at the Venice Film Festival, and has been one of the best received films at The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival. Wendy Ide, The Times’ film critic, called it a “truly extraordinary film with a visceral impact that leaves the audience staggering from the cinema, gasping for air”.

It certainly presents a sharp contrast to the three biggest war films of the year so far: the George Clooney comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Hurt Locker, an adrenalin-fuelled thriller, and Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds.

The films have stirred up an old debate about whether war can reasonably be served up as entertainment.

Lebanon is set entirely inside a tank in the first hours of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The tank itself is a clanking, steaming death trap for its four-man crew but also their shield. and a barrier to understanding what is going on on the ground. The audience is as confused as the four-man crew are and witnesses the horrific violence unfolding outside only through the telescopic gunsight of the lead character, who is based on the director.

As a 20-year-old conscript, Maoz was in the vanguard of the Israeli army that swept into Lebanon 27 years ago. “War is not a subject for entertainment or jokes or heroic stories but I believe that in Hollywood they won’t accept this,” he told The Times.

“People know war from films, usually from American films. and most of them are a kind of entertainment that gives audiences what they want to see: heroes, sacrifice actions and people that die in a very heroic way. This is not the truth. I want to expose war as it is, without all the bullshit around it.”

Mel Gibson recently admitted that he portrayed William Wallace as a hero in Braveheart even though he knew that the man was a monster “because someone’s got to be the good guy against the bad guy, that’s the way stories are told”. For Maoz this is one of the most damaging clichés about war as depicted on screen. “In Lebanon there are no good guys and bad guys — the war is the bad guy and everyone else is a victim.”

Unlike Tarantino, who formed his vision of the world as a video shop assistant, Maoz’s life was changed by combat experience. “On June 6, 1982, at 6.15am, I killed a man for the first time in my life,” he writes in the notes. He describes himself as a guilty victim of war, and his film as an attempt to show audiences how easily they would kill in the same circumstances.

Maoz believes that you have to be a “psychopath to kill” and because most people are not, “war must create a formula that will force you to kill. It does it by the most primitive means: take someone, put him in a real-life danger situation, something you feel in every cell of your body, and you will start to kill.

“You will kill but you won’t forget it, your emotional memory will haunt you for ever.”

He wrote it “in a trance” over four weeks, stirred by his anger at how a subsequent Israeli campaign against Lebanon in 2006 had been conveyed to the public as “reality television”. He said: “I feel better now but I will never feel free.It’s not that I’ve made the film and I’m not guilty anymore. Still there was the moment that your finger pulled the trigger.”

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