Blue Box

<img src="https://data.ajff.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/web_embed_Laurel_JuryInCompetition_02.png" style="max-width: 20%; width: 20%; border-width: 0px; margin-left: 10px; float: right;" />Confronting uncomfortable questions on Israel’s founding, this DocAviv Film Festival winner untangles the vexed legacy of a pioneer who helped a nation bloom from a barren desert. Yosef Weitz, the father of Israel’s forests, headed the powerful Jewish National Fund, whose eponymous blue box campaign sought donations for the Zionist dream. But the tree-planting program and purchase of land often meant displacing Palestinian Arabs. Through painstaking archival research, filmmaker Michal Weits reveals her great-grandfather’s deep moral qualms about Israel’s massive land appropriation and Arab evictions. What unfolds is a thought-provoking and at times painful discovery of a family’s complicity in myth-building and disputed national narrative.