Tribeca Review: Holding Liat Tells the Story of One Family Through a Mosaic of Political Views

The first words we hear in Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat are spoken, over the phone, by a person named in the subtitles as “Israeli Army liaison.” In this short call the male voice tells a perturbed 70-ish man that his daughter, Liat, has been “abducted by terrorists and kept in the Gaza Strip,” alive. From the get-go, Holding Liat seems the kind of film that would tug at your heartstrings, appealing to every ounce of empathy that’s not yet politicized with its story of one family whose daughter and son-in-law were taken hostage on the morning of October 7, 2023. Learning that Brandon Kramer and his brother Lance (both of whom directed the 2021 Van Jones documentary The First Step) decided to make a film about how their relatives in Israel––Yehuda and Chaya Atzili, Liat’s respective mother and father––cope with this unthinkable situation makes one wonder whether this would be emotionally coated pro-Israel propaganda. 

But such a reading (and so early on) would be uncharitable, even if rooted in the kind of well-founded suspicion with which one should approach any political documentary today. Holding Liat quickly reveals a much more complex picture: a constellation of personal opinions, politics, and viewpoints coming from the Israeli-American Beinin family. Chaya, Liat’s mother, voices her concerns but not her views; Tal, Liat’s younger sister, is moderate; twenty-something Netta, one of Liat’s children, is more radical in expressing hate for Hamas kidnapping his parents. On the other end of the spectrum, Joel Beinin, Liat’s uncle and professor emeritus at Stanford, is unafraid to stand with Palestine and criticize the IDF. Then there’s Yehuda, Liat’s father and the protagonist who, rather surprisingly, embodies that very same propagandistic suspicion with which I entered the film.

Kramer observes the Beinin family as both a unit––their interactions, shared grief, heated arguments––and individuals. The camera is present to hyperrealistic degrees, testifying to the urgency of this situation and absolute need for documenting it. Perhaps Holding Liat‘s most expressive parts capture the political clash on a micro-level, where Chaya or Tal berate Yehuda for appealing for more than just the return of Liat. Instead he brings up the misdeeds of Benjamin Netanyahu, even daring to expose Zionists’ skewed perspectives. At one point Yehuda finds himself at a “Save the hostages” rally that quickly devolves into a Zionist demonstration; he is appalled, protests, and leaves. 

But the film doesn’t position Yehuda as a political barometer or ideal of sorts. By including a number of interactions with Congress (and President Biden himself), Holding Liat strives to show further nuances of understanding and support between Israeli citizens and Palestinian supporters. Importantly, the U.S. factor is also examined––the subjects admit that Liat being an American citizen helps their access and ability to apply pressure while risking assimilation into yet another American myth of heroism. If it would be too fanciful a mission for this film to pretend to solve a problem or repair a rift as big as the one dividing our world today, it’s almost better that Holding Liat lingers in the limbo of waiting: for the hostages to be released, for a death to be announced. Kramer, in the director’s statement, places his work “alongside” Israeli and Palestinian films of today, a responsible framing that doesn’t conflate micro and macro politics. Still, the film shows in Tribeca mere days after the Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid boat was abducted by Israeli forces––its impossible to view Holding Liat as a document of the past in a political vacuum.

Holding Liat screened at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.

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