Since the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, most of the documentaries made about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have been told from the Palestinian perspective. Holding Liat, directed by Benjamin Kramer, centers on an American-Israeli couple whose daughter, Liat Beinin Atzili, was kidnapped, along with her husband, by Hamas during the attack and their attempts to secure her release. Most of the movie follows Liat’s father, Yehuda Beinin. The opening scene shows him in closeup talking on his cell phone to an official of the IDF about two weeks after his daughter’s abduction and pretty much getting no useful information. From that point, Beinin and other family members they try to get a handle on a situation that is frustrating in more ways than one. It’s not simply that the Israeli authorities deprive them of useful information, but that the family, Yehuda in particular, quickly believes Liat is of little importance to the Israeli authorities and never was.

As a New Jersey native who built a kibbutz in Israel based on strict socialist principles that envisioned an Israel where Jews and Palestinians could live together productively, Beinin is a constantly conflicted figure. He believes that “both sides are led by crazy people,” but eventually his wrath is reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu and his enablers. It’s an attitude that’s understandable but nevertheless becomes controversial among his own loved ones, who believe they can’t risk alienating the government while trying to make sure that Liat is still safe and can be included in the prisoner exchanges that will start to take place down the road. This campaign finds the extended family—Liat’s siblings, in-laws, not to mention the extant American branch of the Beinins—suffering intermural scuffles that can get quite heated, including one particularly loud argument between Yehuda and his heretofore patient, neutral wife (“Yehuda is better at talking”), Chaya. In Israel and U.S. the family courts the media to gain exposure to Liat’s plight, but the gambit often backfires by instead exposing rifts within the family. “It’s the human side of the story,” says one American reporter unironically. Yehuda’s temper flares into denunciations of what the IDF is doing in Gaza, and while he never utters the G-word, some of his relatives are quick to condemn him for losing sight of the main goal, getting Liat and her husband back, thus undermining that goal with his political statements. When one of his granddaughters says, “Hamas needs to be eradicated” in front of cameras, she’s criticizing Yehuda as much as she is those in the U.S. who sympathize with the plight of people in Gaza. In perhaps the film’s most awkward scene a Palestinian political activist approaches Yehuda to offer his own sympathies and Yehuda has to tell the young man, in a whispered aside, that it wouldn’t look good for them to be talking. 

Kramer’s attachment to Yehuda is understandable from a documentary standpoint since he is not only central to the story but also the most politically articulate member of the Beinin-Atzili clan. This focus itself sometimes undermines the movie’s balanced credibility because the other members can sound merely shrill in contrast, but for the most part Kramer gets at the heart of the problem, which is that politics itself has more to do with compounding the tragedy of Oct. 7 than any purely military actions, though, of course, it is those actions that have caused all the death and destruction. Despite the conditionally happy outcome, Holding Liat ends on the bitterest of sentiments when Yehuda reacts to the way his own efforts have been used for propaganda purposes: “This cannot be the way we live in the Middle East.”

In English and Hebrew. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Holding Liat home page in Japanese

photo (c) Meridian Hill Pictures