- Yehuda Beinin and Chaya Beinin in Liat's home on Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel. Photo Credit: Meridian Hill Pictures
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One Israeli-American family of those residents, the Beinins, is very present to their distant relatives the Kramer Brothers filmmaking team of director Brandon and producer Lance. Their daughter Liat Beinin Atzili was kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and taken hostage to Gaza, and her husband Aviv’s fate was unknown. Her parents Yehuda and Chaya, her sister Tal, and her three young adult children, Ofri, Netta and Aya, agonize over what should they do? The parents are torn between caring for their distraught family and doing whatever they can to get their daughter free.
Their personal trauma and grief is agonizing. Others organized the Hostages and Missing Families Forum to maintain domestic and international attention on those victims through counting days on social media and weekly demonstrations. (The locus in Israel is a re-named “Hostages Square” near the Israel Defense Forces headquarters). But there is special pressure on the Beinins as one of the 12 hostage families with dual American citizenship to influence the intervention of the American president (first Joe Biden, then after the November 2024 election Donald Trump). Some of these exhausted families have channeled their frustration and anguish into very public roles, appearing emotionally at each party’s 2024 U.S. presidential conventions, as well as many different rallies, interviewed on every American media outlet and platform, while personalizing their loved one’s image with family photos.
Unlike these desperate activists and the interviewees in the other films and in the public eye, the Beinins’ reactions still instinctively grew out of the ideological reasons they first moved to Israel in the 1970s, and why they remained living in a secular agricultural community just a bit more than six miles from the Gaza Strip. People in the U.S. and elsewhere seem to have forgotten that for much of its history since 1948, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, had majorities of various leftist entities; the last Israeli government of leftist parties was defeated in 1995, after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Those were the movements that first attracted the Beinins, and continues to impel their family. One of the many ironies of October 7 is that Hamas chose to brutalize communities of “peace-nik”-types who had employed and helped Palestinians. Those Gazans evidently then provided the terrorists with detailed maps, including locations of safe rooms and shelters.
Israel is now governed by the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history, with parties that the Beinins have never supported. Chaya shrinks from this public conundrum to focus on helping her grandchildren function each day: “You have to escape somehow. Mine is not to deal.” While Yehuda fumes over what he sees as the Prime Minister’s political selfishness (as claimed in The Bibi Files), he struggles over being put in the position of lobbying a government he detests to do anything to save the lives of his family members. His wife and a hostage negotiation consultant try to counsel him “to say it nicely”.
Yehuda tries hard to make “nice” when he comes to the U.S. to convince various organizations to push for the hostages’ release. On screen, a critical confrontation crystallizes his dilemma. He reluctantly attends the national meeting of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), an UltraOrthodox sect that conducts extensive fundraising in the U.S. for their international outreach. Refusing to “make nice” by wearing a yarmulke (kippah) to the gathering, he despairs to an informal group of traditionally-garbed men: “I respect you are men of faith. But my way isn’t respected.” He pleads for them to use their influence on their coalition partners. They earnestly respond: “We pray every day for the hostages. The Holy One does miracles.” That is especially galling for him to hear because this is what such religious voters in Israel (there called haredi) claim why they should continue to be exempt from military conscription, a position that is infuriating secular Israelis who are consequently bearing the brunt of reserve military service. He praises his tearful younger grandson for “staying calm” as he also throws himself into the effort to get his mother released.
Suspense builds as the film notes the weeks going by, negotiations are off and on, ceasefires are off and on, numbers of hostages to be released are up and down, names are released and withheld. There are calls with the IDF liaison, the U.S. State Department, and President Biden. More in their family join them. They eventually learn from the military, first, there are clues, then confirmation that Liat’s husband Aviv Atzili was murdered. (The IDF recovered his body in Gaza after the Tribeca Film Festival screenings.)
Just as Yehuda’s brother Joel is a historian who has studied the Palestinians’ perspective and was uncomfortable that the kibbutz was built over Palestinian villages, his niece Liat is a history teacher whose longer view can help her through her ordeal. Specializing in Holocaust education, she sees the dangers of fanaticism and fundamentalism, and stresses peace over revenge. She teaches the parallels between then and now of people who pretend that nothing is happening when one group is against another: “There’s a price for not acknowledging.”
Holding Liat makes that lesson extremely personal.
7/6/2025
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
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