How an intimate and sensitive film about a hostage family’s grief triumphed in Berlin

By A.J. Goldmann
February 28, 2025

BERLIN — “Sometimes a film can do something that nothing else seems to be able to do,” the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa said when she presented the Berlinale Documentary Award to Holding Liat, American filmmaker Brandon Kramer’s sensitive and probing look into the family of a hostage taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. (Last year’s prize went to No Other Land, a portrait of a West Bank village facing demolition by the Israeli government.)

“It creates a space where the complexity of violence and justice and the contradictions of history are not silenced, but brought forward and with such delicate humor,” Costa said.

Contradictions abound in Kramer’s film, an intimate chronicle of one family’s grief in the aftermath of Hamas’ massacre. Shortly after Liat Beinin and her husband Aviv Atzili were taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz, Kramer, a D.C.-based filmmaker who is related to the Beinins, began documenting the aftermath of this personal and national trauma.

Struggling to accept their situation and fighting to change it, the members of the Beinin family respond in various, and often unexpected ways, to Liat and Aviv’s kidnapping. Kramer gives them space to voice their conflicting viewpoints — a thirst for revenge, a yearning for peace, rage at the Israeli government for failing to protect its citizens, silence — in a coolly observational style that is impressively free of pathos or judgment.

At the film’s center is Liat’s Philadelphia-born father Yehuda, who made Aliyah in 1973 and has remained a committed peacenik. Shortly after the attacks, Yehuda travels to D.C. with a delegation of other hostage families. Together with Liat’s middle son, Netta, and her older sister, Tal, Yehuda tour the halls of Congress, meeting with senators to advocate for the release of the hostages. But he quickly grows exasperated at the performative and non-committal support for Israel he encounters among the political elite in Washington and disgusted at how uncritically pro-Israel the American Jewish establishment is.

In a particularly excruciating scene, the families meet with Mitch McConnell. “I just want my parents back,” Netta pleads with him. The senator nods his head absently and mutters, “Yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you. Good luck to all of you.” (In a later scene, Tal calls the senator a “fucking asshole.”)

Yehudah becomes increasingly convinced that coming to D.C. was a bad idea. In a furious exchange with Tal after a Chabad fundraising dinner where a black hatter tells him to pray for miracles, he compares the entire mission to a “dog and pony show.”

We see Yehuda snap at the March at the National Mall in November 2023, which drew a crowd of 300,000. Amid the sea of Israeli and American flags and chants of “Am Yisrael Chai,” and “What is up, mishpacha,” Yehudah sits on a plastic folding chair with a look of disgust on his face. “This is really fucked up. The messaging is all wrong,” he fumes as he makes his way to the exit.

During a group meeting with the famed hostage negotiator Mickey Bergman, Yehuda delivers a jeremiad against Netanyahu. Berman films the scene through a ceiling window, giving us the sense of eavesdropping and peering in behind closed doors. Bibi, Yehuda pleads, is the real “roadblock to peace” and his only agenda is to “keep his ass out of jail.” Bergman rebukes him sharply, telling him that the last thing anyone wants is for the hostage negotiations to get mixed up with a discussion of Israeli politics.

When Yehuda, his daughter and his grandson return to Israel, the film undergoes a dramatic tonal shift. The family members settle into a holding pattern that their excursion to D.C. deferred. There are constant phone calls from Israeli military officials regarding the status of hostage negotiations as Yehudah and his wife Chaya wait — and wait and wait — for news. Kramer films these scenes with an intimacy that allows us to feel the family’s suspense and anguish.

Liat was freed from Gaza in a prisoner swap on Nov. 29, 2023. Kramer films her reunion with her family from a respectful distance. The camera is also running the following day when the Beinins receive news that Aviv was killed. Here, in the film’s most emotionally wrenching scene, Kramer takes a direct yet unsentimental approach. It isn’t detachment so much as respect and humility that allow the scene to play out with such intensity. The grief never overwhelms. Liat’s moral courage and emotional fortitude suffuse every frame.

Revenant and in mourning, Liat understands how lucky she has been, compared to so many others. At Aviv’s funeral, she delivers a shattering eulogy not only for her husband, but for the life she used to know. “In the last two months, we’ve lost so much. We lost precious and beloved people, which is why we’re here today. We lost a home, both physically and in a much broader sense of the word.”

When she invites the funeral guests to dance to Aviv’s favorite song, the gesture is poised between joy and despair, as the family members sob and embrace each other. The film leaves no falsely comforting message like, “We will dance again.” Here those movements are ultimately painful and broken.

In an epilogue set at Yad Vashem, Liat tours the memorial with her high school class. She guides them through a series of pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto. “From outside the Poles see that the Ghetto is on fire and pretend nothing is happening,” she says, leaving them to draw their own conclusions.

In the film’s final scene, we’re alone with Liat for the first time. Sitting outside of Yad Vashem, she makes the connection herself.

“Personally, I saw what happens beyond the fence and I can’t look at it the same,” she says.

“We lived near the fence and who cared about what was happening on the other side? Today that fence has a different significance. There’s a price for not acknowledging…” Her soft voice trails off and Holding Liat ends on a quiet and disquieting note.

This is not a film about good versus evil, about the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. Nor is it a film about the unshakable unity of Am Yisrael. This is not a film about heroism. This is a film about the necessity of acknowledging, however difficult, the validity of uncomfortable perspectives and truths, about struggling to hold onto your family, your home, your humanity, your values, and your integrity as the ground falls out from under you.

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