(RNS) — Two years after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating retaliation in Gaza, a slew of new films are coming to theaters and generating Oscar buzz.
One of them offers a surprising and nuanced portrayal of an American-Israeli family whose adult daughter and her husband were kidnapped from their home on a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Holding Liat” takes place in the early days and weeks after the Hamas attack. It follows Yehuda Beinin and his wife, Chaya, American Jews who immigrated to Israel in their youth, as they try to agitate for the release of their kidnapped daughter, Liat Beinin Atzili, and find out the fate of her husband, Aviv Atzili. The documentary is now showing in New York, and, beginning Friday (Jan. 16), in Los Angeles. It will then roll out at theaters across the country.
Yehuda makes clear he doesn’t trust the Israeli government and detests its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The film documents him setting off with his other daughter, Tal, and with Liat and Aviv’s son, Netta, to the U.S. to try to influence congressional leaders to help secure Liat’s release.
Directed by Brandon Kramer, the documentary benefits from footage of the initial days after Oct. 7. Kramer and his brother Lance, one of the producers of the film, are relatives of the Beinin family, and they called Yehuda immediately after the attack. The brothers had a hunch, almost from the get-go, that they had a more complicated story to tell than the black-and-white version Israel wanted to propagate.
“Lance and I are both documentary filmmakers that live in Washington, D.C., and so we talked with Yehuda about feeling this responsibility to pick up our camera and document some of what they’re going through,” Brandon Kramer told RNS. “And as we started to film, we immediately felt this realization that what they were experiencing, the complexity, the nuance, the perspectives of a father of a hostage saying he doesn’t want his daughter’s captivity to be used as justification for violence, that narrative was not at all in the media or really on social media.”
Since Israel was formed in 1948, hundreds of thousands of American Jews have settled in Israel while keeping their U.S. citizenship. In the past few decades, some have immigrated to the occupied West Bank, where they join a core of ideologically driven Jews at the forefront of building religious settlements on land expropriated from Palestinians.
But there are other American-Israeli Jews who have been active in peace movements and advocating for coexistence with Palestinians for a long time. Some have made a home in the kibbutz movement, the series of communal settlements that dot the country. Among them, some have chosen to live along the Gaza border so they might interact more with Palestinians in Gaza.
Vivian Silver, the Canadian-Israeli peace activist from Kibbutz Be’eri who was killed on Oct. 7, was one. The Beinin family is another example. Liat, Aviv and their children lived on Kibbutz Nir Oz, where nearly 80 people were taken hostage and some 47 residents died at the hands of Hamas.
Not everyone in the family is a peacenik. Liat and Aviv’s son, Netta, who was present during the Hamas attack and traumatized by it, tells the camera: “They need to die.”
On the other side, Yehuda’s brother and Liat’s uncle, Joel Beinin, a retired Stanford University professor of history, is no longer a Zionist and has been active in Jewish Voice for Peace and the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. In the film, he warns that Oct. 7 can’t be understood without acknowledging Israel’s destruction of Palestinian society beginning in 1948, with what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when Israel displaced an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, many of them to Gaza. He now lives in Portland.
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Spoiler: After many anguished nights of waiting for word of Liat’s fate, the documentary pivots to her return. Liat was among the first group of women and children released by Hamas in November 2023, during a brief ceasefire.
Hours after her return, Liat finds out her husband, Aviv, did not survive and her home was torched. (Their three children survived.) And then she was confronted with the filmmakers making a documentary about her kidnapping.
“The approach with Liat was giving her the space and a lot of agency to decide when we could film,” Brandon Kramer said. “And I think that level of agency and respect for her is what got her to a place of comfort.”
Indeed, Liat emerges as a powerful spokesperson for peace in the wake of her 54-day captivity. She has joined The Parents Circle-Families Forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization of over 800 bereaved Palestinians and Israelis who have lost family members in the ongoing conflict. She has written op-eds for The New York Times.
The last shot of the documentary finds Liat, a high school history teacher, at Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem, where she leads tours for teens. She describes the indifference that Germans and Poles showed toward Jews during the Holocaust and later wonders whether Israel has shown the same indifference to Palestinian suffering.
The documentary has been screened before over 100 audiences in 18 countries. Lance Kramer said its alternative narrative has been welcomed.
“We’re told that with all the divisiveness and polarization and fear out there, that any story dealing with Israel, Israelis or Palestinians, especially something with nuance or complexity, is just going to immediately ignite some sort of meltdown,” he said. “And in fact, we’ve seen the exact opposite.”
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