Film Show 072: Yuula Benivolski

Yuula Benivolski

Yuula Benivolski (b. 1980) is a Toronto-based artist and filmmaker who was born in Moscow. At 10 years old, Benivolski’s family left the USSR and relocated to Shlomi, a small town in Israel that was built on the Palestinian town al-Bassa after the 1948 Nakba. She later moved to Canada for school and has been based there since. Benivolski’s work spans sculpture, painting, photography, and film, and her debut feature film, The Black Box is Orange (2026), premieres at this year’s edition of TIFF in the Wavelengths section. The film is split into 10 different parts—nine chapters and an interlude—and is an autobiographical essay film that explores different aspects of her hometown, including pre-Israeli infrastructure, while drawing from personal experiences and memory. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Benivolski on August 30th, 2026 to discuss how she renounced her Israeli citizenship, her circuitous path towards filmmaking, and the making of her debut feature.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: On your website, your bio is an astrological chart. You’re also working on a film called Born on a Train that is based on the Soviet-born ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and that’s based on his astrological chart. Can you tell me a bit about your relationship to astrology and how that informs your life and work?

Yuula Benivolski: I don’t know if that film will go in another direction, but I was interested in exploring my mother’s side of my family, as it’s not given as much space as my father’s. My father’s family was with us longer, and his mother came to live in Israel—Occupied Palestine—when we lived there. With my mom, once her parents died she didn’t really have a connection with her family anymore. At some point I started exploring her side of the family. My mother is Tatar. In some sense, works I’ve made like Eclipse in the Garden (2021) should maybe remain private as they were made for my mother. So with my Tatar side, they’re Muslim and read the Quran in Arabic, and they would invite the imam for the holidays. This was all happening before we moved to Occupied Palestine. We lived in a small town that was incredibly Islamophobic, so once my mom’s parents died, it all kind of ended right there.

I found out when I got my ID in Israel. The ID card shows what you are: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc. From that point on, I kind of stopped living there in my mind. You had to show your ID everywhere and I was terrified of doing that; I would hitchhike instead of taking the bus or train. I basically didn’t explore that side of my family because I didn’t want to admit to my friends that my mother was Tatar and that she was Muslim. At one point, I was already living in Canada for 16 years and I remember bumping into someone. They said, “You have very Tatar features,” and I went (gasps) and started panicking. I didn’t even tell my partner at the time, and we’d been together for 6 years.

After a while, I realized that I didn’t have to feel that anymore. It was no longer unsafe. I used to think that Israel let me in by accident and that if they found out I was Muslim, they would’ve kicked me out. In 2016, when I realized that it didn’t matter and I told my partner, he was like, “Wow, that makes sense why you panicked.” I told my friends and then it became a normal part of my life. Part of that has been exploring Tatar figures. My dad is Ukrainian and my mother is Tatar. When you look at Russian people, I don’t look like them, but when I see pictures of Tatar women, they look like little copies of me. We’re past this simple idea of representation now, but at the time, seeing people who looked like me and my family… I always felt that there wasn’t anyone who looked like us, so finding people who looked like me was really comforting.

With Rudolf Nureyev, I was interested in exploring his life because of all the mythology around him. He said he didn’t know what money was, so when they asked him how much money they should pay him after he defected to the United States, he asked for something insane for the 1960s or 1970s, like $10,000 a month. I understood this sort of naivety towards money and capitalism. I was born in the USSR and lived there until I was 10 and absorbed a lot of it. For me, I still have this relationship with money where I don’t respect it. It’s necessary and I know how to get it, but I don’t respect someone because of it, and I find some people’s relationships with it to be strange.

I found out that me and Nureyev were both born on a Wednesday and we had a similar background. His father was Bashkir and his mother was Tatar. And he was born on a train, so with astrology it’s interesting because this was a moving place of birth. When we left Moscow and took the long train journey to Bucharest before being flown to Tel Aviv, it was a sort of rebirth in a way. It was like my life changed to the point where it became unrecognizable. I felt this affinity with someone who was born on a train, who was an artist, who ran away, who had a tumultuous relationship with their family, and who wasn’t able to go back to the USSR. I didn’t realize when we left that we wouldn’t be able to go back. To hear him describe it and how he misses his family, how when you go back you’re still a stranger… I’m sure many people have this experience where if you go back you realize that you’re not that same person anymore. But I wanted to step away from all of that identity stuff and move into the mysterious world of what made him become an artist. It’s kind of what happened to me—I became an artist because my environment was suffocating, and it was the only way I was able to survive emotionally.

When did you recognize that art would be a way for you to survive in this way? I’m curious about your trajectory. I saw some of the early works you’ve made on your website. Self Portrait (2007) and Shadow (2008) are both sculptural pieces, but I’m wondering what came before that.

Photography was the first thing I studied. My dad used to have a darkroom in our bathroom back in Moscow. My dad was a sailor on a commercial fishing boat, and my parents had us when they were young—my mom was 21 and my dad was 20. He was on a fishing boat when I was born a month prematurely, and my mom had to send him a telegram—she told him to come home. He got off at the next port and took all the trains and buses he could. I believe this was the time of the Moscow Olympics, in 1980, so the city was closed off and he said he had to sleep on benches to wait to come back into the city. While coming home, he bought a camera. I still have it with me.

He used that camera to photograph our family. When we slept, he’d use the bathroom as a darkroom and he’d have the photos hanging. I’d see them when I took a bath. It was something that just existed, and there was always a pile of photographs on our shelf. The thing is, we left all our photographs when we left. We left one photo of each of me and my siblings before age 10. At the time, in 1990, we couldn’t take a lot with us. We sold out house and things were rushed, and I don’t know what happened to them. I used to obsess over those photos. I would look at them and ask my parents to pack them when we went somewhere. Not having any images of yourself when you were younger even though you remember them… it’s strange. You can’t see them, so you can only keep imagining them until they disappear.

My parents would always put me and my sister in art classes. She was 3 years younger than me. We’d paint and draw and make things. When we moved, we said we wanted to study art so they took us to this art class at this woman’s home. She was living in this apartment with her husband, but three months later he was no longer living there, and I saw that that she was living with a friend. So it was two women, and they were always kind of semi-nude. That was my first time seeing a queer person. I was only 11, and I was living in a really religious and conservative area. This was happening at the town that I talk about in my film, Shlomi. We moved straight there, and it’s because one of our closest relatives, my paternal grandmother’s cousin, had been living in the nearest town since the 1970s. When we showed up in 1990, she found my dad a job in this town.

There’s another reason we lived there, and it’s because it was one of these transit towns where the people who arrived weren’t wealthy. My neighbors were Soviets or from Tunis, Yemen, or Morocco. It was mostly Soviets or Arab Jews. When we were there, it was a small town and there was nothing to do, so my mom wanted us to do something instead of just playing outside. As a child, I told people that I wanted to be an artist or a detective. When I eventually went to high school, I realized this place was a dead end—my teachers weren’t even making an effort to teach us anything. But across the road was an art school, and I begged my parents to let me apply. I went through the interview process and exams and my life changed entirely. I felt that I needed to do this or that I would wilt.

It’s funny that you say that you wanted to be a detective because it’s similar to the research you see with the “Little White House” section of your film, The Black Box is Orange (2026). You said you were taking a lot of photos early on, and I’m curious what that practice was like for you and how it’s evolved over time. Obviously you had documentation with photographs for your Migrant Creatures (2010) piece as well as your portrait series called Surfers (2016) in Oaxaca. Can you talk to me about how you’ve grown as an artist through that specific medium?

When I was in art school in high school, I was a painter. They took it very seriously—you had to write a thesis and you had an exhibition. I did that, and I’m not really sure what happened, but when we moved and I decided to go to art school, I just didn’t want to do it anymore. The way I approached photography was almost like painting, in a way. And it was also kind of like film, because I was never the kind of person who would only take one photo of a person—it would always be serialized. Eventually, I got into documenting other people’s work because I couldn’t find myself in being a photographer. There’s something about the repetition required that I couldn’t bring myself to do—it wasn’t enjoyable or good. I really admire photographers and photography, but I don’t think I have it in me to do it myself.

Like you feel restricted by it? You need something more?

I don’t find it interesting. I find it interesting when I look at other people’s photos, but I can’t do it for myself. So I started making zines, and photographs would be accompanied by poems or stories. Something about the immediacy of it was so satisfying. If I had something that I wanted to make into a book, I’d photograph something right away and just make this thing. And with this thing, it’d become more and more complex. I find that I need to experiment, and through that, something grows. It’s hard for me to plan something and simply execute it; it’s not the way I feel creative.

Why make films, then? Why did you decide to make a feature film, and what do films do for you that photography can’t?

For a while I was using text and images and serializing them, and it was almost like I was making a film with stills. Filmmaking is something I was working towards for a very long time but I was afraid to trust myself with it. I’ve made so many films that will never see the light of day. With film, because I learned how to make photos in a darkroom, I never learned how to do digital photography. Film, for me, is the closest artform to the body. Whatever the film experiences, I experience—if it’s cold, I gets cold. If there’s a scratch, I sense it.

There’s that one film, Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (2014) by Tomonari Nishikawa. Something I find very impressive about that work is that the reason it was made was because the country declared that the land [near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant] was safe because they removed the topsoil. When you bury film in soil, the first thing that happens is that it gets eaten by bacteria, but it wasn’t getting eaten because the bacteria was dead. And there were also these flashes of exposure even though it was buried in the ground at night. Filmmaking can be very physical.

Is his film what inspired the fifth chapter in The Black Box is Orange? That’s the one section that’s more experimental and you drench the film in water.

I had this memory of when my family moved to Shlomi. We all decided to walk to the sea. We didn’t have a car, and it was the Sabbath so there were no buses or taxis, so we decided to walk. We walked along the highway for 3 km and got lost. We tried to take a shortcut through this banana plantation and everyone was crying—it was an upsetting experience. While this was happening, a man came by and gave us oranges, and he was excited that we were new in town. We went to this beach, and it was very dark and rocky. It was stormy that day. It wasn’t very welcoming. That was my memory of it. In reality, we didn’t take a shortcut, we walked around the banana plantation. And there was an orange juice factory with a man who walked out and gave us oranges. There’s a picture of me standing on the beach and squinting. So, I went to the beach before I knew this initial memory was not real, and I was bawling. It was a strange experience because I was just crying and at the same time, there was this celebration happening where they were giving an award to this fisherman who caught the biggest fish. The next time I went, I took some water from the sea, put them in a couple bottles, and that’s what I developed the film in.

In talking about your film, I think it’s also important to talk about the fact that you renounced your Israeli citizenship. I’m curious what that process was like for you, both in the leadup and the actual renunciation, but also the response from friends and family.

The reason I went back to Israel in the first place was because my grandmother died and I had to help my parents with the funeral. All the stuff I learned about Israel happened about five years after living in Canada. I remember having this memory of playing in ruins and I was in the library at the time. I started looking up stuff and everything started to make sense. So when my grandmother died, I had already been reading about this for a long time, and I was seeing everything with new eyes—it was crazy. When I was there, I was kind of dissociating because it felt like I was in another world. People were being kind to me, giving me directions or whatever, but there was this disconnect because they didn’t know or didn’t care about what I now knew. It was a terrifying feeling.

So I had been thinking about renouncing my citizenship, but I was told it was impossible. We were told that we’d have to sit in front of a committee and that we wouldn’t be able to go into the consulate if we didn’t have a valid passport, which I didn’t have for most of the time. So there were all these obstacles, but they were lies. Israel is trying to win the war of demographics, and it’s why they’re trying to bring in people from wherever they can. It’s why they brought all the Arab Jews from Iraq and Yemen and Morocco. There’s always been waves of people, and it’s because they want there to be a larger Israeli population.

On October 7th, when I saw what was going on, I had this feeling that this was it. I saw people who were “leftists” revealing themselves to be liberal Zionists or taking a sharp turn to the right, and I thought that by removing myself in this way and getting other people to do it, it could change something. About 10 days after October 7th, I got a call from a friend in the West Bank. She told me that a lot of workers from Gaza were deported—Israel uses Gazan workers as cheap labor to build their homes, for example—and a bunch of workers who were stuck there after October 7th were deported to the West Bank. And this happened even though the West Bank and Gaza are different places; they probably didn’t have family there. But that’s what Israel did, and there was nothing they could do. They had no phone, food, or money, and my friend said that they were fundraising money for these workers. I did a couple days of fundraising, but the day I called her to send her money, she was screaming. She was at a march and they were being teargassed by the Palestinian Authority, which was the ruling government of the West Bank for 20 years who collaborated with Israel. This was the day of the first hospital bombing, on October 17th, when over 500 people were killed.

Is that when you knew you had to do this?

Yes. The first thing I did after hearing this was that I opened the consulate page and made an appointment. It took a month because they were terrified of people coming in. I didn’t tell my parents but I told my sister, and I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do it because I was scared. I was told they were going to take me into the basement of the consulate and put me in a van. They told me they were gonna fly me back to Israel and put me in prison. There were all these stories. I looked up stuff online and I only found three people who talked about rencouning their citizenship, and one of them didn’t do it—she just wrote an essay about it—while the other two did. One was Avigail Abarbanel, who is a psychotherapist and writer from Glasgow. She did it in 2001.

I wrote to her and she responded within an hour. She said, “You’re never gonna regret this, it’s the right decision. Whatever happens at that consulate will not be bad enough for you to not do this.” That’s all I needed to know. I told a Palestinian friend I was going to do this, and once you say something like that out loud, you can’t take it back. It’s like when you tell someone you’re going to quit smoking—I made myself commit to it. My friends said, “You should write a statement. It can’t just happen quietly.” So I did write a statement, and we made a website to guide people on how to do this because the whole process is so opaque.

To get inside the Israeli consulate, you have to leave everything you have in a locker and you don’t even go upstairs. There’s a camera downstairs in front of the elevator and you buzz in. They ask for your ID and you show them your passport, and then they ask who you are. They tell you someone is coming down, and they bring down a Shin Bet officer, so like a Secret Service person. They have an earpiece and they interrogate you in this very specific way. “How did you get here today? Where do you live? Where’d you live in Israel? Who was your elementary school teacher? Who were your neighbors? What street did you live on?” They ask you all these things, like the towns nearby. They want to trip you up. So I was interrogated, and then he asked me why I was here. And as a note, I brought a group of friends with me to wait outside.

I told him that I was here to renounce my citizenship. This was a month after October 7th and he was like, “What? Why? What’s the problem?” I told him that I was an artist and that I travel a lot and only wanted to use my Canadian passport. I didn’t want to use my Israeli passport anymore. That’s something you have to do when you go back there—you always have to use the Israeli passport. If you pretend that you’re only Canadian, they’ll look you up and know you have an Israeli passport and make you another one on the way there.

He asked me more questions. “Who came with you today?” “My boyfriend.” “Who’s your boyfriend?” And then I told him his name. “Does he have any other nationalities?” I said no. “Who else came with you today?” “My friends, they’re outside.” And he told me to wait. Within a minute, three more Secret Service guys come down—and this is in the middle of Toronto, which is ridiculous—and they go outside to my friends. They circle them, check them out, and then they finally let me go upstairs. When I was up there, it was kind of sad to be honest. They knew why I was doing this, and they were very nonchalant about it. It was like they weren’t even listening to me. “Sign here, pay this.” I had to pay $140. “You’ll get an email in three months.” I also went up there a second time to get my document, but the person who interrogated me was doing it in English, which is like the weirdest thing—you don’t even speak Hebrew? I was waiting for my document and they were talking for an hour before I told them I had to go to work. Then they gave it to me.

I read a statement afterwards, but I was so nervous with the Shin Bet officers following me around that I was giggling the whole time. Oliver Husain, a filmmaker from Toronto, filmed it. I was embarrassed because I was nervously giggling and it looked like I was just laughing. I ended up rerecording the statement and posting it for my friends. I went to bed, and when I woke up, it must have been posted somewhere else and over a million people saw it. People were calling me and writing to me. It’s probably good that it happened because it encouraged other people to do the same thing, but it was also the opposite of what I wanted to happen.

What do you mean by that? What would you do differently?

Maybe I wouldn’t have made a video and would’ve just written something. I made the video because someone recorded me the first time and I thought I’d just do it again in the same way. I despise being public. It was nice because almost every single person from high school and my previous life stopped speaking to me. This included people who were “leftists.” There were all these horrible comments, like, “I always knew you were a psycho!” I just blocked everyone because I couldn’t deal with it.

My family was upset, mostly because I didn’t talk with them about it. They didn’t want to be embroiled in all this. I was so horrified by the attention. I cannot tolerate that much exposure at once. I still go back sometimes and read the messages because there were thousands of them, and some of them were very nice and from all over the world. But ultimately, me doing that didn’t really change anything. I still have the document, and I have it framed like people do with their degrees. I’m happy that I have it (moves camera to show me her framed document). Maybe one day my family will talk about it, but it’s hard to believe that people can change at that age. And I don’t think that I can make them change either.

I didn’t want to put this experience into my film. That’s something I’m very weary of, which is the grifting side of all this alongside social media. I didn’t do anything with my statement beyond fundraising money for someone else. I find it very gross when people do this and they’re like, “By the way, here’s my art show about it!” I’m really happy I did it, but I don’t want to be associated with that group of people.

I wanted to start talking more directly about the film. You made it over the course of several years, from 2018 to 2022. How long ago did you know that you would have this episodic structure of nine chapters and an interlude?

That just happened as I was writing and editing it. It began as a 20-minute thing, and then it grew to over three hours. I realized that there was so much going on so I cut it in half—this was Part One, and there’s going to be a Part Two. With this film, the space that I talk about is only 3 km x 3 km. I’d never made a feature before, and I had never written anything that was going to function with a long, interconnected structure. I found it nearly impossible to imagine how I’d go about that. It would end up being something so long that I wouldn’t even feel like watching it. My original film was to provide little snippets, like the conditions of the soil at a certain time. I wanted the audience to get at the meaning of what I was doing on their own—I didn’t want to force things on them. But early on, I realized that I couldn’t make anything that even seemed neutral because it was impossible.

I read this essay by Ariella Azoulay, who is a curator. She had an exhibition in Israel and wrote an essay [in 1994] called “The Black Box of the Occupation (Who Will Acclaim the Heroisms of Israel?)” that was about the archives. She said that the Israeli archives functioned as a black box because they contained random bits of information and crucial evidence all side-by-side, as if they were equal. And some of that evidence, if you removed the forced Israeli interpretation—the notion that violence against Palestinians is “necessary”—the materials could be used as evidence for their crimes. It could be used for purposes related to criminal accountability.

When I originally went to the military archives, I went because my friend’s photographs had been stolen. The first time I met her, she told me that her brother had been assassinated by the Mossad because he was the secretary for the DFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine]. She had also already been shot, too. Then she told me that she didn’t have any family photos because they were stolen by the military when she was a child. I went, and my first time there I felt like I could find these photos. And I thought this because I spoke Hebrew, I’m Israeli, and I had a passport. That was naive of me.

While I was there, though, they allowed me to have some photos. The black box metaphor was true: you have these photos of an invasion into a foreign country, you have a soldier who’s training others to commit ethnic cleansing, there are people reenacting terrorist acts that were committed against the Palestinian Arabs in the 1940s. There was all of this stuff you could see in the photos. You had evidence of all these crimes. The title is called The Black Box is Orange because the black box is actually orange. You’ll see something but it’s not actually what’s being said. And that also occurs in general ways, like I’ll say the [train] platform is green but then you see it in black and white.

A lot of the film is about how Israel is obscuring and suppressing information, but you’re also thinking about how all these different elements are interconnected. There’s one point where you talk about the man that pins you to the wall when you’re a teenager, and how patriarchy and violence against women is inextricable from Israel’s own violent history. You talk about how your town was a “buffer town” and that the people living there have these big tax breaks, which led to tech workers coming in. And then now we’re thinking about how our world is dictated by these same people.

I’m glad to hear you say all this. With the third chapter, I rewrote that so many times and it was going to be twice as long at some point. My town, up until one year ago, was emptied. It was evacuated after October 7th until about a year ago, but it became a ghost town. My art school, which was in the nearby kibbutz and not in my hometown, became a military base. All the places that were in the film… people returned, but a lot of them, especially on the other side in South Lebanon, were gone. I used to hike a little bit and see everyone there over the fence. All of that has been destroyed. All of the towns in the Northern border were also empty. When I renounced my citizenship, I realized that any sort of diplomatic relations were never the goal. I feel so silly and naive now when I look back.

With that one chapter, I wanted to make clear that when you are teaching a group of people to dehumanize another group—where they don’t think twice about shooting another person—it starts from when they’re a child. When you go to Israel and talk to children, you can see the wheels turning. This notion of hierarchy is such a big part of society. When you talk to someone, they immediately start assessing you and figure out how to speak to you. That’s the result of living for 80 years by always dehumanizing people who live near you. When I was a child, I felt that people knew that I wasn’t Jewish, and it was terrifying. That was the real danger for me. There were always rockets, and my hypervigilance got directed to this other thing.

So much dehumanization happens through the destruction of history. In the film you talk about the heirlooms getting destroyed, you were just mentioning the photographs being stolen. At the end of the film, you talk about the JNF [Jewish National Fund] and what they’re doing to cover up the remains of Palestinian life. In the third chapter, you talk about this area where everyone swam and fished, but now it’s specifically just for the military. There is no opportunity for people to learn about anything, to experience these places and learn about their history. You said earlier that you wanted to plainly state specific truths, and I’m curious how you thought about your script, your voiceover, the rhythm of your speech. You also have the one section in the bomb shelter where there’s text without any voiceover.

My town was bombed twice a week the whole time I lived there. And when I talk about it now, I kind of don’t really feel anything. It was more of a nuisance than anything else. But there was this epidemic of sexual harassment, assault, and violence towards women—and especially women like me who were foreigners. I mean, even when I went back in 2022 to film, I didn’t notice that a rocket fell because I had headphones on, but if a man even turned towards me while I was walking, I was ready to fight. That stays with you. That sort of dehumanization, which most women experience from when they’re 11 years old, is something I still can’t deal with or think about. In that chapter, I said that I stopped going to the bomb shelter because I was scared about bumping into a man down there.

I know that the film is very personal, and I know that it’s almost confessional in places, but I have been so restrained. I stripped down basically everything I could until only the essence remained. I don’t really have an interest in making trauma porn. Nobody wants to be put into that position. When I included my friend’s child in the film for the interlude, everyone who watched the film was saying, “I was just waiting for something bad to happen.” That’s why I noted that the 1-year-old child is now 5. With all of my films, there needs to be some distance or it needs to be mediated through a variety of layers. Some of the footage in the film was shot on a phone and then re-filmed on a projector and then digitized and so on.

I watched a David Lynch lecture once and he said something like “Write 70 scenes and you’ve got a movie.” I thought, cool. I wrote 84 just to be safe (laughter) and I put them up on the wall. I wrote them using all my research, and it didn’t sound very conversational. So when I was recording myself and listening to myself tell this story, it just felt like I was reading from a textbook. I then started thinking about myself in relation to these things. It’s a lot easier to understand these ideas when someone’s telling you a simple story—like the one about me driving with my mom in the middle of the night—rather than treating something like some sort of equation. That’s what I was afraid of. I tried that for the first chapter that was made, which was the one about the [train] platform.

The project was originally going to be about the Hejaz railway. I became obsessed with it. It was such an unbelievably impressive railway, and when I went back for my grandmother’s funeral, I went to this train platform. I was so shocked because my town only had a bus that ended at like 5PM or something. There used to be a train that went all the way here, and I found out that the previous [Palestinian] town that was there had 60 shops, a hotel, a central bus station, and an agricultural co-op that supported the entire region. Israel loves to talk about how all these villages were primitive, but this town was four times bigger than mine. I was wondering why they couldn’t make the train here, and it’s because they made an artificial border and declared a state of emergency for everyone all the time.

I wanna ask about the last section of the film when you see the protest and the Palestinian flags. Where did that take place and why did you decide to end it in this fashion?

The last section of the film is a march that used to happen every year. I think 2022 was maybe the last time it happened properly. I don’t know if it happened in 2023, but I know that they don’t allow them to do it anymore, at least not to the same degree. Israel celebrates their Day of Independence on May 14th, and then Palestinians have Nakba Day on the following day, May 15th. On the Day of Independence, there’s this march with people who were forced out of their villages. These are people who either moved to Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan, though some stayed within Occupied Palestine, within Israel. Every year, they pick one place and the people who used to live there march through it, and that’s the only day where the gates are open and they’re allowed to have access to this land.

There’s a film called Ma'loul Celebrates its Destruction (1984) that depicts this. I watched that film in Ma'loul on the day they were allowed in there. We watched it projected inside of a church, which is not functional but is still standing. The people from the film and town were there. On that day, there was this organization called Zochrot, which in Hebrew means “We Remember” but in the female form. They bring survivors of the Nakba or their children to where they used to live, and they describe what happened when the Jewish militias invaded. It’s mostly geared towards Israeli Jews and internationals. There’s about 50-100 people every time, but in this particular place there were more, because a few days before that, [Palestinian journalist] Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered.

The next chapter of this project is going to be about a child becoming an artist who escapes this environment. I love artists—I love talking with them and filming them and seeing how they live their lives. I filmed this man who was a glassblower since he was 6 years old. I filmed it with Shireen Abu Akleh’s cousin, Fadi Abu Aqleh. After being in Israel, going to Bethlehem and Hebron and filming him was so refreshing. When Fadi dropped me off at the checkpoint, he said, “Things aren’t so bad right now, I think things will be okay.” And the next morning his cousin was murdered. The march happened a couple days later, and when I entered that area, there were hundreds of police with cars, motorbikes, and whatever you can imagine. They were armed. It was border police—military police—and regular police. The point was intimidation; they didn’t want people to go in. When we were in there, I was aware that we were surrounded and that while there were many of us, there were even more of them.

In the film you can hear people talking about JNF. The tour that we were on was infiltrated by a JNF volunteer who showed up and interrupted the tour guide the whole time, arguing with him. I filmed the whole thing, and then I filmed the JNF man walking in front of me. He kept talking to the people on the tour and you could tell it was all about bureaucracy for him. It was this slow nagging, and everything there is punishment by bureaucracy. It’s so dysfunctional. If you’re Israeli Jewish and need help from someone, it might be days before you can get help from someone. If you’re Palestinian, it’ll probably never happen. There’s a certain futility you feel.

I wanted to end the film this way because it was one of the last things I did there, and it actually felt good to be with them. There were so many young people. I never saw a Palestinian flag in all the time that I lived there. We used to shop in Palestinian villages and towns all the time but I never saw one. You could see a lot of kids waving flags at the march and they weren’t scared. They were chanting, yelling “Freedom, freedom, freedom!” After all of the shit that came beforehand, it was nice to experience this on my last visit.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m not afraid of people. Through the experience of immigrating twice, I can go up to anyone and ask anything. I’m not fearful when it comes to that. For the second film that’ll come out, I interviewed both my Zionist high school teachers. I went to a school that was considered the most leftist of them all—it was considered very liberal—but they taught an incomplete history.

Yuula Benivolski’s debut feature film, The Black Box is Orange, plays at this year’s edition of TIFF.

Thank you for reading the 72nd issue of Film Show. Freedom, freedom, freedom.

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