‘Holding Liat' Review: A Hostage Documentary Confronts the Limits of Empathy

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24-02-2025

The contradiction between acknowledgment and difficult acceptance lies at the heart of Brandon Kramer's documentary — about his elderly relative Yehuda Beinin dealing with his daughter Liat's Oct. 7 abduction — which establishes numerous political parameters through observation, in an effort to conjure sentiment. It succeeds on occasion, though given its thorny subject matter, your mileage may vary.
The winner of the Berlin Film Festival's Documentary Award, 'Holding Liat' isn't quite as revelatory or forceful as last year's recipient (the West Bank land-grab exposé 'No Other Land,' which is currently nominated for an Academy Award). However, it wrestles even with its own place as a chronicle of an Israeli hostage family — one of two such films in this year's lineup; the other is the much more blinkered 'A Letter to David.' Kramer, by comparison, reveals a greater awareness of the political mechanics at play, and the place his movie occupies, by touching on how the pain of hostage families can be weaponized.
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Yehuda gradually confronts this reality too. He speaks on it as much as his political sponsors will allow on his trip to the United States, where he meets with various senators while trying to sputter out objections to Netanyahu's bombing campaigns, and to the numerous Palestinians held in captivity by the IDF. He occupies a precarious position, as his other family members note. The resultant cognitive dissonance has great aesthetic value, though how much ethical value it holds for any viewer will likely depend on their political outlook. This manner of reading the film is inherent to its making: Kramer seldom interviews his subjects, and seeks mostly to capture a delicate reality unfolding in the moment with handheld intimacy — while also attempting to contextualize that reality, using as light and unobtrusive a touch as cinematically possible. Its hands-off approach comes to no real conclusions; a documentary needn't, but 'Holding Liat's' focus is people searching for solutions in the first place. It can't help but feel the film is missing some kind of emphasis or statement on the numerous viewpoints it captures.
On one hand, Liat's teenage son, still reeling from the trauma of Oct. 7, demands blood. On the other, Yehuda attempts to walk a fragile moral line as a knowing political pawn in a greater chess game — whose intended outcome is war — while attempting to retain his pacifist beliefs by holding bad apples to account, if not the greater structures at play. His face is also a particularly potent canvas for the movie's drama. Liat's abduction (alongside her husband) appears to have left Yehuda frozen in stasis, unable to find an answer beyond broad gestures toward 'peace' in the abstract.
It's an understandable conundrum, given the shattering pain he feels, but even his attempts to convince American politicians to scale back war efforts hit an emotional blockade when he first comes face to face with a Palestinian spokesperson in Washington, D.C. They find common ground while speaking in whispers, lest Yehuda's chaperones listen in. However, the reality of the situation comes crashing down on Yehuda in a complex moment of mutual recognition — of acknowledging familiar loss, and all that implies about his similarity to those who took his daughter during the Al-Aqsa Flood.
Here, the film starts to pivot in intriguing ways, as Yehuda practically experiences real-time whiplash. This transition from theoretical to practical confrontation is all but debilitating, as the grieving father reaches the limits of his empathy. This is when Kramer makes the key decision to expand his lens, capturing not only a wider array of protests against the U.S. government, but a greater cross-section of opinions and approaches within Yehuda's own family. Among them, his brother Joel, a professor of Middle Eastern history who left Israel long ago, speaks at a conference in support of Gaza, where numerous members sport both Jewish yarmulkes and Palestinian keffiyeh.
Although Joel doesn't feature for more than a few scenes, his presence sets a vital framework for 'Holding Liat,' via his recognition that the Kibbutz on which he lived (the kind from which many Israelis were abducted) was built on stolen land. As a member of the family and a student of history, Joel remains similarly torn in his emotional obligations, but his disagreements with Yehuda on possible solutions practically send the latter packing. There's only so much broader culpability Yehuda is willing to accept, and only so much compassion he's willing to show as he tries to secure his daughter's release.
This emotional deadlock is key to the overall form the movie takes — in part, because there's only so far Kramer can scrutinize this stalemate without directly impacting the ongoing narrative. However, the camera's non-interventionist nature becomes vital. The visual approach embodies the Beinin family's loss of control, and the growing uncertainty around them and what they believe. For instance, the surprising details of Liat's capture fly in the face of the tales of barbarism the subjects have been told. At one point, Liat's own background as a historian becomes briefly central, if only for how one character comes agonizingly close to recognizing how the Holocaust can be used to justify further atrocity.
The mere acknowledgment of a greater context — of a history of Palestinian oppression pre-dating Oct. 7 — is a major sociological blockade that 'Holding Liat' at least recognizes, regardless of whether it fully confronts it. The difficulty of doing so from within Israel's borders becomes, by the movie's closing moments, a central fixture of its emotional impact, even though its scrutiny of this personal and political compartmentalization only goes so far. The film is, in a way, tethered by its subject matter, unable to look beyond the peripheral vision of its characters in order to provide a more dynamic and multifaceted view of them and the world they occupy. However, as a work aimed at capturing a thorny perspective, it's an adequately thorny match.
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