‘Holding Liat’ review: Israeli family suffers their own hostage crisis

Dir. Brandon Kramer. US 2025. 93mins

The winner of this year’s Berlinale Documentary Award, Holding Liat is an emotionally rich, politically thought-provoking account of one Israeli-American family’s ordeal in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Shot primarily in the weeks following the abduction of two family members, Brandon Kramer’s film offers intimate, empathetic insight into the impact of the attacks on the Beinin family; it also depicts a more complex picture of Israeli citizens’ political attitudes than has often been available in the wake of Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza.

Helps bring nuance and understanding to a continuing crisis

With hostage releases still taking place and the Middle Eastern situation becoming ever more complex given recent American intervention, this timely film, which has Darren Aronofsky among its producers, should find receptive audiences everywhere, and help bring nuance and understanding to a continuing crisis.

Respectively directed and produced by brothers Brandon and Lance Kramer, relatives of the Beinin family, the film started shooting two weeks after October 7, when teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband, artist and mechanic Aviv Atzili, were among those taken hostage in the Hamas attack on Israel’s Kibbutz Nir Oz. Much of the film focuses on their elderly parents, American-born couple Yehuda and Chaya Beinin, resident in Israel since the early ’70s. The film records their worry about Liat and Aviv, and continuing frustration at their not being included in the lists of hostages due for release.

Yehuda agrees to visit the US as part of a delegation to encourage the American government, then under President Biden, to push for hostage release. But Yehuda – whose car carries a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker – is a committed liberal staunchly opposed to the Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose motivations and prioritising of military action in Gaza he thoroughly disapproves of. On his US visit, Yehuda is horrified to find his presence, and that of other hostage families, being used to support pro-war agendas. 

Meanwhile, Yehuda’s insistence on discussing a possible peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians is not only considered a distraction by some organisers of the trip, but also opens up differences within his family. His grandson Netta – who himself survived the Nir Oz attack – is more strictly focused on his parents’ release, while the distress of long uncertainty takes its toll on Yehuda and Chaya. Representing another position again is Yehuda’s brother Joel Beinin, who – like Liat’s sister Tal, also prominent here – lives in Portland, Oregon. Joel is a professor of Middle Eastern history whose own experience of living in Israel in the ’70s left him thoroughly disillusioned with the nation and what it represents. 

Brandon Kramer gets close to the family in a way that, were he not related to them, might be regarded as intrusive – there’s one moment when Yehuda says, “Off the record…” and Chaya retorts that the term is meaningless under the circumstances. There is one uncomfortable moment on the US trip when Yehuda is approached by a Palestinian advocate. He seems uncertain about the man’s motivations, and about how much he should confide in him about his own convictions – not least with the camera recording their conversation.

When the family finally receive definitive news, the outcome is at once happy and tragic. The film’s coda, shot three months after the main events, has Liat musing on what she has learned from her experience as a hostage, one that seems to have been less painful than  others. 

This profoundly revealing documentary should help lift the taboo observed by many who have preferred not to address the events of October 7 in the light of Israel’s subsequent actions. The film is structured and edited in such a way as to emphasise narrative clarity and the emotional content of its family portraiture, with Jordan Dykstra’s music spare but sometimes over-emphatic. None of that, however, compromises the film’s integrity as a depiction of crisis, or as a plea for a peace that continues to be agonisingly elusive.