Holding Liat: "the guiding light... in telling this story has been to confront fear, because the amount of fear that has been communicated to us throughout this whole process...has not been realized."

In this conversation, Vanessa Hope and Brandon Kramer explore how Holding Liat follows Brandon Kramer’s own relatives after Israeli-American teacher Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband are kidnapped on October 7, tracing the family’s frantic advocacy in Washington, D.C., and their emotional fractures over politics, grief, and the weaponization of victimhood narratives. Brandon discusses the ethical and emotional challenges of filming close family in real time during an ongoing crisis, balancing his role as a supportive relative with his responsibilities as a documentarian, and using a single family as a lens to reveal the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict’s complexity. Brandon describes how the film resists reductive binaries, includes perspectives like Yehuda’s peace activism and his brother Joel’s critical historical framing, and ultimately centers Liat’s own post-captivity call for coexistence and empathy toward Palestinians, which shapes the film’s ending. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe