Holding Liat

Holding Liat, directed by Brandon Kramer, is not just another documentary about the October 7, 2023 attacks; it is a deeply intimate, politically charged, and emotionally devastating portrait of one family’s struggle to cope with the abduction of their daughter while confronting the uncomfortable truths about Israel, Palestine, and the world’s response. Unlike other works that lean toward unfiltered propaganda or oversimplified narratives, Brandon Kramer’s film occupies a much more nuanced space, forcing the viewer to sit with the contradictions, hypocrisies, and raw emotions that define a tragedy of this scale. That complexity is what makes the film so compelling, and at times, unbearably human.

At the center of the story is Liat Beinin Atzili, a civics teacher and dual American-Israeli citizen, who along with her husband, Aviv Atzili, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas incursion. Their abduction is the spark for an extraordinary journey of grief, rage, political reckoning, and reluctant diplomacy undertaken by her parents, Yehuda and Chaya Beinin. Brandon Kramer, a relative of the family, had access to the most intimate and unguarded moments, capturing both the despair of not knowing if Liat would be released and the fracturing of family unity as political convictions clashed. Yehuda Beinin emerges as one of the most fascinating documentary subjects in years—a man shaped by the socialist ideals of the kibbutz movement of the 1970s, who still clings to the belief in peace and coexistence even as his daughter is held hostage. His refusal to blindly align with the nationalist fervor sweeping through Israel after October 7 places him at odds not only with the political establishment but at times with his own family.

The contradictions play out in profoundly moving and sometimes bitterly comic scenes. In Washington, Yehuda Beinin is seen lobbying members of the U.S. Senate, including Mitch McConnell and Joe Manchin, in hopes that Liat’s American citizenship could pressure the Biden administration into negotiating for her release. Yet he loathes every second of it. His daughter, Tal Beinin, at one point bluntly reminds him that he doesn’t have the luxury of turning these meetings into ideological debates—“Do you think I wanted to meet Mitch McConnell?” she snaps, voicing the pragmatic calculation needed to get results. But Yehuda, wearing his “Good Morning Vietnam” t-shirt and carrying a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on his car, cannot help himself from railing against Benjamin Netanyahu and the religious extremists who, in his view, hijacked Israel’s government. These moments, captured by Brandon Kramer’s unobtrusive lens, expose the heartbreaking tension between personal desperation and political conviction: can a father mute his lifelong beliefs if it means possibly saving his daughter’s life?

The generational divides within the family sharpen this dynamic further. Netta Atzili, Liat’s son, channels the fury felt by much of Israel’s younger generation. His anger is visceral, his desire for vengeance almost instinctive, yet as the film progresses, we watch his fire dim under the weight of futility and exhaustion. It’s a striking reversal of roles—grandfather preaching restraint and moral accountability, grandson consumed by rage. Then there’s Joel Beinin, Yehuda’s brother and a professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford, who takes an even more radical stance, openly rejecting Zionism and speaking at pro-Palestinian conferences. The film shows these ideological rifts not as abstract debates but as living wounds within a family desperately united by love yet splintered by beliefs about justice and responsibility.

What makes Holding Liat so powerful is the refusal to sanitize these contradictions. Brandon Kramer allows silence, frustration, and even hypocrisy to seep into the frame. When Yehuda storms away from a “Save the Hostages” rally that devolves into a pro-war Zionist spectacle, his disgust feels genuine, but so does the viewer’s unease that he might be alienating allies who could help bring Liat home. Likewise, when the family is told to play up their grief as political theater for U.S. lawmakers, we see the emotional toll of becoming symbols rather than people. The documentary becomes a study in the weaponization of suffering—how the unimaginable pain of hostage families can be used to justify military aggression or political maneuvering, often without their consent.

The payoff, when it finally arrives, is devastating in its complexity. Liat Beinin Atzili is eventually released after weeks in captivity, while her husband Aviv is confirmed murdered, his body still withheld. Her reunion with her family is profoundly moving, but what follows is even more striking. Rather than emerging radicalized, Liat speaks candidly about the humanity of her captors’ families, her refusal to see Palestinians as faceless enemies, and her disgust at the idea of starving civilians in Gaza as a military strategy. “People shouldn’t starve to death, no matter who they are,” she insists, an assertion of compassion that cuts against the grain of both Israeli hardliners and Hamas apologists. In that moment, the film transcends politics to deliver a human truth: pain can harden hearts, but it can also widen empathy.

Brandon Kramer closes with a sequence at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, where Liat continues to guide visitors. As she draws parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza—between people watching smoke rise from across a wall, choosing not to act—the weight of history bears down on the present. It is a daring and perhaps controversial choice, but one that crystallizes the film’s central theme: empathy cannot be selective. The Beinins’ tragedy becomes a mirror reflecting the larger moral failings of both sides, and perhaps of all of us as observers.

Winner of the Berlinale Documentary Award and later screened at Tribeca, Holding Liat is not an easy film to digest. It will likely anger those who see it as too sympathetic to Palestinians, just as it will frustrate those who think it clings too much to Zionist frameworks. But that is precisely its strength. By refusing to offer simple answers or neat moral victories, it forces viewers to wrestle with the contradictions of love, loyalty, politics, and justice. In doing so, it honors not only the resilience of the Beinin family but also the complexity of a conflict that has defied clarity for generations. For a documentary born out of urgency, grief, and proximity, it achieves something rare: it becomes both a document of one family’s suffering and a call to reexamine how empathy and politics collide in times of war.

Holding Liat
Directed by Brandon Kramer
Produced by Darren Aronofsky, Lance Brandon Kramer, Yoni Brook, Ari Handel, Justin A. Gonçalves
Music by Jordan Dykstra
Cinematography: Yoni Brook
Edited by Jeff Gilbert
Production companies : Meridian Hill Pictures, Protozoa Pictures
Running time : 97 minutes

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