Forests and Forestry

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

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    In this documentary, Michal Weits tries to process her ideas about her great-grandfather Joseph Weits, who was regarded as the father of Israeli forests.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 BoxNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ Review: Magic Kingdom

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      Jörg Adolph uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize a German forester’s contention that trees are social, sentient beings.In his best-selling book, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” the German forester Peter Wohlleben drew in millions of readers with a tantalizing hypothesis: that trees are social, sentient beings, who talk to each other, feed and nurse their young, sense pain and have personalities. While Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic language and seductive blend of science and speculation rankled some professionals, this was precisely the selling point for lay readers: an opportunity to see how trees share some of our own traits, and are worthy of our empathy and care.Directed by Jörg Adolph, the documentary “The Hidden Life of Trees” uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize Wohlleben’s observations. Jan Haft’s camera peers deep into tree bark, and the entire universes of organisms therein; it captures the blooming of plant life in rapturous time-lapse shots; it lovingly traces the outlines of rustling, sun-kissed canopies. All the while, the voice-over reads snippets from Wohlleben’s book, letting us into the secrets of nature that lie beyond human vision and temporality.These scenes are interspersed with Wohlleben’s field trips and lectures, and as in the book, his accessible style and infectious passion is the main draw here. What the film successfully imparts is not so much scientific certainty as an affecting sense of curiosity and reverence, which Wohlleben deploys to a pragmatic end: to argue for the ecological management of forests, which would ensure their communal health and longevity, and therefore that of humankind. Crouching next to a 10,000-year-old spruce, Wohlleben reminds us of man’s comparative insignificance as well as power. “The only thing it cannot withstand,” he says of the spindly tree, “is a chain saw.”The Hidden Life of TreesRated PG. In German, Korean and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More