The day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in Israel, filmmaker Brandon Kramer learned that two of his relatives were presumed to be among the hostages taken into Gaza.

A few days after hearing the news about their kidnapped family members—Liat Beinin Atzili and Aviv Atzili—Kramer (’09) and his brother, Lance, called Yehuda Beinin, Liat’s father, to check in. “We love you guys. We’re here for you. Let us know anything we can do,” they told him.

It was during that phone call that the brothers learned Yehuda would be traveling to Washington to advocate for the release of his daughter and her husband, who were Israeli-American dual citizens. The brothers, cofounders of DC-based Meridian Hill Pictures, a film production company, thought it would be important to document the family’s experience navigating the early days of this crisis. They didn’t know how they’d use the footage, and were “not at all thinking this would be a feature film,” Brandon says.

The filmmakers followed Yehuda, along with Liat’s son Netta and her younger sister Tal, as they walked the halls of Congress and spoke to a range of senators, from Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont. These three generations of an Israeli-American family, however, were not always on the same page. Yehuda was often at odds with Tal and Netta, the three of them wrangling over how best to bring their loved ones home—and what to do to achieve a lasting peace and resolution in the region.

While the family was repeatedly urged by advisors to keep politics out of their pleas to return the hostages, Yehuda especially felt called to make broader calls for peace—and objected strongly to unqualified support for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

What the brothers recorded in Washington got them thinking about a more in-depth story to follow.

Epicenter of the Story

At the end of a day of filming in D.C., the Kramers and producer-director of photography Yoni Brook retreated to their hotel and immediately began talking about a feature-length film.

“Here we are with this unique access point to one family who are at the epicenter of this geopolitical crisis,” Brandon says. “And what they’re navigating between themselves offered a microcosm to the kind of debates and discussions and, frankly, fractures that were happening in families and communities all over the world.”

The brothers were well-prepared to tell this kind of story. “We spent the last decade trying to use documentary to make sense of very complex personal stories of people at the center of these social and political crises,” Brandon says. 

[We] have gravitated towards stories that deal with very important issues, but in particular, issues that are polarizing and misunderstood.

Brandon Kramer

Meridian Hill’s previous features illustrate this well. The company’s first, City of Trees, shows the “inspiring but messy world of job training and the paradoxes changemakers face in urban communities everyday,” as the film’s synopsis puts it. Their second feature, The First Step, followed the civil rights activist Van Jones as he tried to work with the first Trump administration on criminal justice reform. 

“Lance and I have gravitated towards stories that deal with very important issues, but in particular, issues that are polarizing and misunderstood,” Brandon says. He credits this instinct, somewhat, to his time at Boston University, where he did a concentration in anthropology and within his film major was “exposed to bold and original kinds of filmmaking.”

The story that fell in their lap after October 7 could hardly have been a better fit. After the brothers followed Yehuda, Tal and Netta to Washington, they decided to drop everything else they were working on, and rapidly built a team for what was now becoming their third feature film, Holding Liat.

Before long, Brandon and Yoni were on their way to Israel. They reconnected with the family of Liat and Aviv, following especially closely as Liat’s parents Yehuda and Chaya continued their quest to bring the hostages home. For several nights, Brandon and Yoni slept on the floor outside Yehuda and Chaya’s hotel room, determined to capture the 2 a.m. phone calls that delivered the heartbreaking news, day after day, that Liat and Aviv were not on the list of Israelis to be released. And—no spoilers here—the Kramers worked with a filmmaker in Israel to continue documenting the story for several months.

It took about a year to edit hundreds of hours of footage working with award-winning editor Jeff Gilbert—an exceptionally fast timeline compared to the five years it took the Kramers to create each of their two previous features.

In Good Company

Meridian, along with production partner Protozoa (filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is a producer on the film), finished the film days before the Berlin International Film Festival, known as the Berlinale, where Holding Liat premiered in February. As the screening ended, the family and filmmakers walked on stage to a long standing ovation, Brandon says.

What struck Brandon was the first question they received from the audience. It came from a Lebanese man who sought out the film because he had never met an Israeli family, and who said it “gave him light in a moment of darkness.” His question? If he could come up to hug the family, which he did, a physical manifestation of the bridge-building the film was meant to foster.

The festival screened Holding Liat a few more times, but the real achievement came at the awards ceremony, when the film won the festival’s “Best Documentary” award. Perhaps fittingly, last year’s winner in Berlin was No Other Land, a documentary that depicts the destruction of a Palestinian community in the Occupied West Bank, and which went on to win an Oscar in 2025. (Shortly after, one of the film’s Palestinian codirectors, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked by Israeli settlers and detained by the Israeli military, according to the Associated Press).

To Brandon, the award was a validation “of the importance of telling human stories about these kinds of conflicts and really embracing the messiness, the shades of gray,” he says. 

Holding Liat is currently playing at other festivals around the world, and will have its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June.

Brandon says the need for the film is as acute now as it was when they started filming in 2023.

“Millions of people’s lives are at stake right now,” he says, “And if we can’t have conversations across lines of differences, if we can’t engage with nuanced stories around these kind of topics, then it’s people who are living this daily reality, whether it’s in Gaza or in Israel or in Lebanon, that are the ones that are suffer the most.”