The Black Box is Orange

The debut feature by Toronto artist and filmmaker Yuula Benivolski, The Black Box is Orange is a multimodal, autobiographical essay film that deploys both personal memory and incomplete archives to reflect on an upbringing in a militarized border town.

The central locus of the film is the former Palestinian village of al-Bassa, near the Lebanese border, which after the 1948 Nakba became the Israeli town of Shlomi, and where Benivolski spent her childhood and teenage years. Now, from the perspective of adulthood, she unpacks an adolescence spent under the spell of settler ideology by probing the nagging points at which state-mandated and population-supported occlusion meets the frayed fringes of memory.

The film’s ambitious structure consists of 10 dynamic and stylistically distinct chapters. These range from first-person, guided investigations into lingering traces of pre-Israeli infrastructure, to formal plays with contrapuntal sound and image, to hand-processed experiments that wordlessly invoke the colossal weight held in the image of the landscape. While certain chapters are deeply researched and nearly scholarly in nature, the majority are raw, personal, and bravely confessional. One constant, however, is an astute balance between a sense of politics and poetics, with the latter elevated through the use of textured 16mm and an exceptionally refined sound design.

A film not just several years in development, but one could say a lifetime, The Black Box is Orange reckons with grand questions of place, belonging, responsibility, memory, and narratives — situating them in an urgent present as much as the past — with both moral clarity and artistic sophistication.

ANDRÉA PICARD

Content advisory: mature themes