Early on, it was clear the Beinin-Atzili family was not a typical hostage family, filmmaker Brandon Kramer, director of the new award-winning documentary “Holding Liat” said on the Haaretz Podcast.
After learning that his relatives, Liat and Aviv Atzili, had been kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and held hostage by Hamas, and that Liat’s father and son were traveling to Washington, D.C. several weeks later with other Israeli-American hostage families to lobby on behalf of their loved ones, Kramer knew he had to document the visit.
As he began to film what would become “Holding Liat” – which won Best Documentary upon its debut at the Berlinale Film Festival and is about to make its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival – Kramer noticed that their family’s experience “didn't fit neatly into any box.”
Yehuda Beinin, Liat’s father, was openly calling for peace and reconciliation, and opposing the forceful military response the Israeli government was planning - from the start. At the same time, Kramer explains, “His grandson Netta – who had barely survived the attacks and was traumatized and very angry – and his other daughter, Tal, didn’t want to speak about politics at all. So within this one family, we saw a microcosm of the debates and fractures, and we felt we had a responsibility to try to make sense of this moment through this one family's lens.”
Also speaking on the podcast, one of the film’s producers, Libby Lenkinski, noted that the authenticity of “Holding Liat” held it apart from the slew of October 7 documentaries designed with a political agenda that comprise “hour-and-a-half long visual op-eds” focused on making either a pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian case.
At the same time, Yehuda, the film’s focus, “is a really great example of something that we see often on the left – a person warning about what might be coming and initially being thought of as alarmist or paranoid, and it turning out to be true.”
When Yehuda was filmed in the first months of the war, warning that Netanyahu would pursue a brutal and endless war to serve a far-right political agenda, “I don’t think any of us could have imagined the kind of devastation that we would be seeing in Gaza, the endless killing and destruction. I think so many Israelis wanted to believe that this was necessary to bring back the hostages, and now it's just so clear that that was never the point. …Yehuda called out Bibi's bluff early on, and it turned out to be truer than we ever would have wanted to believe.”
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