(2.5 stars)
Three weeks after Hamas kidnapped 49-year-old Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband, Aviv, during an attack on their kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023, Liat’s American-born father, Yehuda Beinin, traveled from Israel to Washington to urge politicians to help advocate for the hostages’ release. Accompanying Yehuda were Liat’s younger sister, Tal Beinin, and the Atzilis’ son Netta, both of whom also appear in the new documentary “Holding Liat.” While Yehuda believes the wisest path forward would be for Israelis to seek peace and reconciliation with Palestinians, Netta struggles to see past the militants’ assault on his home.
“They need to die,” Netta says to his family in the film. “I know there are probably lots of people who are innocent in the Gaza Strip. We can’t just raze the place. But what happened there made it a lot more difficult to know who, exactly, is innocent.”
Yehuda raises his eyebrows at his grandson’s statement in a mix of shock, disappointment and pained understanding. He knows how horrible this experience has been for Netta and his two siblings, but he recognizes that such rage-fueled remarks can be terribly shortsighted. Directed by Brandon Kramer (“The First Step”), a D.C.-based relative of the Beinin family, “Holding Liat” follows Yehuda’s journey as a way into exploring the fraught emotions and generational divides that exist among the Beinin and Atzili families. The resulting film offers a unique and revealing — but fundamentally incomplete — perspective on the ongoing war in Gaza.
Kramer and his brother Lance, a producer on the film, flew to Israel soon after learning Liat and Aviv were taken. They began filming at the Beinins’ home in Kibbutz Shomrat as Yehuda prepared to travel to the United States, where he and his wife, Chaya, lived before emigrating to Israel in the 1970s. (The family maintains ties to each country; Liat and Tal are dual citizens, and Tal lives in Portland, Oregon.) The camera hugs Yehuda and Chaya’s faces as they weigh the efficacy of pleading with American politicians for help. As Yehuda drives to the airport, Kramer zooms in on his Bernie Sanders bumper sticker.
The D.C. scenes are valuable for how they capture the complicated layers to Yehuda’s internal state. He criticizes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu early on in the film as apathetic toward the hostage crisis, claiming that the Israeli leader’s true “agenda is preserving the government, annexing the West Bank, making his coalition partners happy,” but faces resistance from other Israelis — including his own daughter, Tal — who would rather focus on their family members’ safe return. They tell him that U.S. congressmen won’t help them if they turn this into a political issue, to which Yehuda argues, “The United States has never had a problem with overthrowing other governments when they stand in the way of American interests.”
Yehuda winces in discomfort as he listens to a speaker at the March for Israel in D.C. call for the “total destruction” of Gaza, recognizing that his best chance at getting Liat and Aviv back home might require aligning himself with people with whom he doesn’t fully agree. When he encounters Palestinian advocate Ahmed Mansour in the halls of Congress, Yehuda says their politics are more alike than Mansour may realize. But he whispers as they speak, not wanting to upset the group sponsoring his D.C. visit.
Liat is released in good health after 54 days in captivity. Aviv does not return, and the family learns that he was killed on Oct. 7. “Holding Liat” is a tough watch, full of grief and existential pain, that also prompts difficult questions: How far would you stray from your beliefs to save a loved one? Is it truly possible to achieve a two-state solution, as Yehuda desires? How do you reconcile a horrific communal loss with the retaliatory destruction of another people?
Kramer does not push the Beinin or Atzili families to contemplate this last moral quandary, in likelihood due to the urgent and sensitive nature of their situation. But it is his responsibility as a filmmaker to find some other way to sufficiently deal with it — and he falls short of doing so. While Yehuda mentions the hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, “Holding Liat” fails to address the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the war. The closest the film gets to confronting the disproportionate loss is when Yehuda speaks on the phone with his brother Joel, a Portland resident who left Israel decades ago because he could not continue to accept that his kibbutz was “built on the destruction of three Palestinian villages.”
“Don’t you think that every day Israel is creating members of a new Hamas by what it’s doing in the Gaza Strip?” Joel asks. Yehuda responds that it’s a legitimate question. But the tense conversation doesn’t go much further, at least on-screen.
Unrated. At AFI Silver Theatre. Contains mature themes and strong language. In English and Hebrew, with English subtitles. 97 minutes.
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