A Hostage Documentary Confronts the Limits of Empathy

The contradiction between acknowledgment and tough acceptance lies on the coronary heart of Brandon Kramer’s documentary — about his aged relative Yehuda Beinin coping with his daughter Liat’s Oct. 7 abduction — which establishes quite a few political parameters by way of statement, in an effort to conjure sentiment. It succeeds once in a while, although given its thorny subject material, your mileage might differ.

The winner of the Berlin Movie Pageant’s Documentary Award, “Holding Liat” isn’t fairly as revelatory or forceful as final 12 months’s recipient (the West Financial institution land-grab exposé “No Different Land,” which is presently nominated for an Academy Award). Nevertheless, it wrestles even with its personal place as a chronicle of an Israeli hostage household — one in all two such movies on this 12 months’s lineup; the opposite is the far more blinkered “A Letter to David.” Kramer, by comparability, reveals a higher consciousness of the political mechanics at play, and the place his film occupies, by relating how the ache of hostage households could be weaponized.

Yehuda regularly confronts this actuality too. He speaks on it as a lot as his political sponsors will enable on his journey to the USA, the place he meets with numerous senators whereas attempting to sputter out objections to Netanyahu’s bombing campaigns, and to the quite a few Palestinians held in captivity by the IDF. He occupies a precarious place, as his different relations word. The resultant cognitive dissonance has nice aesthetic worth, although how a lot moral worth it holds for any viewer will doubtless rely upon their political outlook. This fashion of studying the movie is inherent to its making: Kramer seldom interviews his topics, and seeks largely to seize a fragile actuality unfolding within the second with handheld intimacy — whereas additionally making an attempt to contextualize that actuality, utilizing as mild and unobtrusive a contact as cinematically doable. Its hands-off method involves no actual conclusions; a documentary needn’t, however “Holding Liat’s” focus is individuals looking for options within the first place. It could possibly’t assist however really feel the movie is lacking some form of emphasis or assertion on the quite a few viewpoints it captures.

On one hand, Liat’s teenage son, nonetheless reeling from the trauma of Oct. 7, calls for blood. On the opposite, Yehuda makes an attempt to stroll a fragile ethical line as a understanding political pawn in a higher chess sport — whose supposed end result is struggle — whereas making an attempt to retain his pacifist beliefs by holding unhealthy apples to account, if not the higher constructions at play. His face can also be a very potent canvas for the film’s drama. Liat’s abduction (alongside her husband) seems to have left Yehuda frozen in stasis, unable to search out a solution past broad gestures towards “peace” within the summary.

It’s an comprehensible conundrum, given the shattering ache he feels, however even his makes an attempt to persuade American politicians to reduce struggle efforts hit an emotional blockade when he first comes head to head with a Palestinian spokesperson in Washington, D.C. They discover frequent floor whereas talking in whispers, lest Yehuda’s chaperones pay attention in. Nevertheless, the truth of the scenario comes crashing down on Yehuda in a fancy second of mutual recognition — of acknowledging acquainted loss, and all that suggests about his similarity to those that took his daughter throughout the Al-Aqsa Flood.

Right here, the movie begins to pivot in intriguing methods, as Yehuda virtually experiences real-time whiplash. This transition from theoretical to sensible confrontation is all however debilitating, because the grieving father reaches the bounds of his empathy. That is when Kramer makes the important thing determination to broaden his lens, capturing not solely a wider array of protests in opposition to the U.S. authorities, however a higher cross-section of opinions and approaches inside Yehuda’s circle of relatives. Amongst them, his brother Joel, a professor of Center Jap historical past who left Israel way back, speaks at a convention in help of Gaza, the place quite a few members sport each Jewish yarmulkes and Palestinian keffiyeh.

Though Joel doesn’t characteristic for quite a lot of scenes, his presence units a significant framework for “Holding Liat,” through his recognition that the Kibbutz on which he lived (the type from which many Israelis had been kidnapped) was constructed on stolen land. As a member of the household and a scholar of historical past, Joel stays equally torn in his emotional obligations, however his disagreements with Yehuda on doable options virtually ship the latter packing. There’s solely a lot broader culpability Yehuda is prepared to just accept, and solely a lot compassion he’s prepared to point out as he tries to safe his daughter’s launch.

This emotional impasse is essential to the general type the film takes — partially, as a result of there’s solely to this point Kramer can scrutinize this stalemate with out straight impacting the continuing narrative. Nevertheless, the digital camera’s non-interventionist nature turns into very important. The visible method embodies the Beinin household’s lack of management, and the rising uncertainty round them and what they consider. For example, the shocking particulars of Liat’s seize fly within the face of the tales of barbarism the topics have been informed. At one level, Liat’s personal background as a historian turns into briefly central, if just for how one character comes agonizingly near recognizing how the Holocaust can be utilized to justify additional atrocity.

The mere acknowledgment of a higher context — of a historical past of Palestinian oppression pre-dating Oct. 7 — is a serious sociological blockade that “Holding Liat” at the least acknowledges, no matter whether or not it totally confronts it. The issue of doing so from inside Israel’s borders turns into, by the film’s closing moments, a central fixture of its emotional influence, regardless that its scrutiny of this private and political compartmentalization solely goes to this point. The movie is, in a manner, tethered by its subject material, unable to look past the peripheral imaginative and prescient of its characters with a purpose to present a extra dynamic and multifaceted view of them and the world they occupy. Nevertheless, as a piece geared toward capturing a thorny perspective, it’s an adequately thorny match.