‘Blue Box’ Review: Grappling With an Ancestor’s Impact

In “Blue Box,” the director Michal Weits challenges a national narrative about Israel that, for her, also happens to be a family narrative. One of her great-grandfathers was Joseph Weits (sometimes spelled “Weitz” or with variants of “Yosef”), who had a reputation as the father of Israel’s forests. That was how Michal thought of him growing up.

Joseph Weits oversaw land and forestry initiatives for the Jewish National Fund, but that job description leaves out important context. In the 1930s, before the founding of Israel and in preparation for a possible Jewish state, he was instrumental in purchasing land that Palestinians lived on. During the 1948 war that followed the declaration of Israel as an independent nation, he assembled a committee that sought, among other things, to prevent Arabs from returning. The film makes the case that transforming the landscape, including planting trees, became a way of ensuring that.

Joseph left behind voluminous diaries that Michal pores over in the film (Dror Keren reads his words in voice-over) as she tries to reconcile her ideas about her ancestor. In his writings, Joseph expresses conflicted feelings about his actions, which — “Blue Box” emphasizes more than once — occurred against a backdrop of antisemitism throughout Europe and the Holocaust. Michal interviews members of her extended family, who have a range of attitudes about Joseph’s legacy and in some cases are reluctant to engage with it.

“I don’t want to be a part of this,” Michal’s father tells her late in the movie, after suggesting that, had she been around in 1948 or 1949, she would have been standing proudly with her great-grandfather’s cause. Part of the power of “Blue Box” is that it can’t say for sure if she would. And the familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.

Blue Box
Not rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters.