The Black Box Is Orange
(Canada, 90 min.)
Dir. Yuula Benivolski
Prod. Nora Rosenthal, Yuula Benivolski
Programme: Wavelengths (World premiere)
It only took Yuula Benivolski her whole life to make The Black Box Is Orange. Some artists need two or three lives because they take on impossible projects like this one, chipping away at the rock day after night.
In 2024, Yuula renounced her Israeli citizenship in a viral video. She is a Canadian Jew whose family lived in the Palestinian village of al-Bassa until the Haganah, an armed terrorist group (precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces) killed and terrorized Palestinians, forcing them out of their homes. This occurred in 1948 as part of an organized campaign that inaugurated the new country. 750,000 Palestinians were driven into exile. In an act of colonial erasure, and to hide their crimes, many villages and towns were renamed, including al-Bassa. That’s where Yuula grew up, in a placeless place where no one spoke about the catastrophe that made their new lives possible.
In this feature-length movie made in ten parts (each with its own unique style), the artist swims against the current of family to retrieve a stunning trove of archival photos that show a mixed city of Arabs and Jews. Palestinian picnics, Jewish families on the stoop, and sharp-looking Palestinians in suits are all arranged in a fearful symmetry that show how much they had in common. Although unseen in these pics, fanatically detailed plans were being laid at the same time, house by house, by an organized corps of killers posing as interested neighbours.
One of film’s ten sections looks at a small white house on a hill. Part of an ancient trade route, it was once close to rail tracks that ferried passengers between Palestine and Lebanon. The artist ingeniously mixes family photos, archival prints, book engravings and a commemorative propaganda film about bats to show and tell the story of this house. Narrated in a winning and spacious deadpan, we see how the small house began as a vital connecting point in a global flow, then turned into a sprawling military installation that now reserves the beach for soldiers, while waters where her family once fished are now off limits, patrolled by a large military boat.
A Palestinian friend and neighbour of Yuula’s recounts midnight raids by Israeli soldiers. At gunpoint, the family was roused out of bed and gathered into a single room while soldiers ransacked their belongings. Among the items they are assigned to steal are photographs. Family albums. Any evidence that there is a past, a lineage, proof of belonging on this land. Benivolski’s film is a counter-archive, showing photographs that have never been seen before. They offer a very different version of the history the artist was raised on, and that continues to inform most of the corporate media in the north.
What is a nation but the organization of forgetting?
The filmmaker takes us through the layers of her former home. What the present day of her neglected city looks like, a city built for marginal and unwanted people, the most bombed city in the country, where residents are offered a 70% tax break simply for living there. She shares with us a family of chickens finding their way. And follows with a bravura personal slide show filled with pre-teen intimacies, bad boyfriend and good boyfriend.
One section opens with a long, image-less passage as titles narrate life in the bomb shelters, which were visited often, and then not at all because the rockets flew over the town and landed “harmlessly” in the fields beyond. This account is followed by a story with Benivolski’s nurse mother who brings a patient back to life in a nearby hospital before driving home during an attack because Yuula has school in the morning. Death was never far.
The Black Box Is Orange is an overwhelming marvel that wears many faces. It’s a stunning archaeology of the apartheid state. It takes courage to stand up against a country that insists it is not only your home, but the home of every Jew. To stand up against your family and every story designed to hide the truth, which turned out to be exactly as large as a country. How do you leave everything behind when that is the cost of sharing these images? Who would have the nerve to take that risk? Who would cross that border?
