Holding Liat opens at NYC’s Film Forum on January 16, and will expand to other cities soon.
By Elazar Abrahams
It’s hard to describe Holding Liat as simply a documentary about the Israel-Hamas war, of which this site has covered a few. It’s more intimate than that, and in certain ways, more complex. The film follows the Israeli-American Beinin-Atzili family as they navigate the terrifying uncertainty of Liat Beinin-Atzili being held hostage in Gaza, and the public and political machinery that surrounds that trauma.
What makes the documentary so compelling, and probably enraging to many, is that it does not treat the family as a monolith. The film is grounded in the emotional reality of wanting a loved one home, but it refuses to flatten what that means politically, morally, or psychologically. Within the family itself, different relatives hold conflicting ideas about how to advocate for Liat, what the “right” public posture looks like, and what the war means in real time. That internal tension is not presented as dysfunction for its own sake. It’s presented as the truth of being human inside a crisis that turns every sentence into a potential statement.
One of the documentary’s most revealing threads is the politics of advocacy itself. It shows how quickly a family’s pain can become a symbol, and how easily symbols get hijacked. You watch the family trying to communicate urgency and humanity, while larger forces shape the message into something more convenient. There’s an especially frustrating subtext here about messaging and leadership, and how badly the Netanyahu-aligned political apparatus has, at times, fumbled making the case to the wider world for why the hostages matter as human beings, not just as rhetorical ammunition. Of course, they never should have had to; that goes without saying.
Anyone wanting to get out of their echo chamber of Middle East opinions should really seek this one out.
I give Holding Liat a B+.
TV and City 