Interview | Brandon and Lance Kramer, the Filmmakers Behind ‘Holding Liat’
When two Israeli family members went missing on October 7, the DC-based filmmakers jumped into action.

Brothers Brandon and Lance Kramer directed and produced the award-winning documentary Holding Liat, which had its world premier at the Berlin Film Festival in February (where it won the Berlinale Documentary Award) and has screened at other festivals since, including Israel’s Docaviv. The film follows members of the Kramer brothers’ extended family in Israel as they fight to get their daughter Liat and her husband Aviv released from captivity after they were taken hostage in the attacks of October 7. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
(TRIGGER WARNING: The interview contains pertinent information about the fate of some hostages.)
How did Holding Liat come about?
Brandon: A few days after the October 7 attack, we got word that Liat and her husband Aviv, two of our distant Israeli relatives, were missing. When Lance and I went to Israel for the first time, we lived on their kibbutz and stayed with Tal (Liat’s sister) in Tel Aviv. This family was our introduction to Israeli life and society. We have stayed closely in touch with them; we were at a bat mitzvah together a month before Hamas attacked. When we found out Liat and Aviv were missing, we felt a strong desire to do something to help. We called our family in Israel and learned that Yehuda was coming to DC, where we live. He wasn’t getting a response from the Israeli government but was getting one from the U.S. government. This crisis that had fallen into our families’ lives was now coming to our doorstep.
Between Yehuda, his children and his grandchildren, it was really clear that each member of the family was processing this crisis in a very different way, and none of them fit what Lance and I were seeing represented in various media forms. So we felt a responsibility to pick up our camera and start filming. The world was trying to make sense of this moment, and telling honest, nuanced and intimate stories of one family felt like it could be very important in this escalating conflict.
Lance: We worked intensively not just to tell the story, but to tell it so it could be in the world with urgency. We did that hopefully without cutting corners on our storytelling process. To be able to document the story in real time and complete the film, and have it be available as something audiences can engage with now, as opposed to five years from now, felt like a responsibility. It has not been easy. As filmmakers we feel this is the way we are able to contribute toward empathy, humanity and hopefully some sort of lasting peace.
Do you do filmmaking and production full time? Do you have day jobs?
Brandon: We probably should have other day jobs. Lance and I are brothers and we started Meridian Hill Pictures, our production company, here in DC in 2010. It’s been 15 years. We’ve been making documentaries that tackle complex social and political issues, typically through a very observational cinema-verité approach where we are documenting a human story of people who are caught in pretty turbulent times that we find to be very revealing. Our first documentary, City Of Trees, made in 2015, is about the impact of a job-training program in Southeast DC. Our second film, 2021’s The First Step, was made during the first Trump administration, about a controversial effort to bring conservatives and progressives together to pass a landmark criminal justice reform bill. Then we made Holding Liat in 2023 through 2024.
Are there any cinematic influences you guys were working from?
Lance: We love the films of Robert True. He was one of the early adopters of cinema verité back in the 1960s. He made Crisis, Primary, and a number of others that situate you as a viewer directly in the epicenter of huge geopolitical moments, in a visceral and intimate manner. We are also very close with Gordon Quinn of Kartemquin Films, the Chicago organization behind Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap. Their approach is similar to how people like True and D.A. Pennebaker both approach their work. They are also really invested in documentary ethics and the relationship building required to tell those stories responsibly and with care.
Speaking of documentary ethics, you made this film with a subject whom you are personally connected to. What are the ethics of making a film like that?
Brandon: This is by far the most ethically complicated and frankly painful experience that Lance and I have ever gone through. Whenever you are making a film like this and embedded in someone’s life who is going through something difficult, you have to have a sense of how to show up as someone who cares about these people but also as a documentarian. With this story it was at a different level. Our relatives were going through the worst days of their lives, not knowing whether their daughter, sister, mother or father were alive. They were also being thrust onto the world stage and having to raise awareness of Liat and Aviv’s situation. On top of that, they weren’t agreeing with one another.
They took this enormous leap of faith in allowing us to bear witness and document really intimate disagreements between a father and daughter, a husband and wife, a grandparent and grandchild. They were not sleeping and tensions were as high as possible. We had to take that seriously. We felt that there was a constant process of pushing too hard. We were living with Yehuda and Chaya at this time, sleeping on the floor outside of the room in the hotel where the displaced members of their kibbutz were being housed. We were embedded into their lives. I would film moments where something really difficult was happening, and I would push too hard and the family would tell me that, or I would feel it. Then I would have to rebuild trust. At other times I had to put the camera down and just show up as a family member and support them. Then something profound would happen, and I would miss it with my camera.


When Liat was released, 54 days after October 7, that changed everything again. We’d been filming their family this whole time and we didn’t know how she was going to feel that this film was in the process of being made. Should we film, and how do we film, the moment when she is released from captivity into the hospital? Fortunately the family saw the importance of that moment being filmed. Twelve hours later, Liat found out that her husband had been killed. Within 24 hours we had to have a conversation with Liat about the fact that a film was being made she didn’t know about, a day before she held the funeral for her husband. She had to decide whether we should document that sacred moment. Finding Liat would not have been possible without the familial connection. It allowed intimacy, but even with that level of trust, you don’t get to this place easily. You don’t get there without a near-hourly reevaluating process of “Should I be filming this? Why? How?”
When was the moment you realized that this was going to turn into an actual film? What level of buy-in did they have? Reservations?
Brandon: There is a scene early in the film where Yehuda, Tal and Netta (Liat’s younger son) are all in DC in the lobby of a hotel. Yehuda tells his family that while of course the number one priority is to advocate for the hostages’ release, he feels that this is an opportunity to speak out about the “day after,” about peace and reconciliation, coexistence. Tal felt very strongly that this was not the time for that. Netta had barely survived the attack only two weeks earlier. His parents were missing and he was really traumatized and angry. You had three generations of Israeli Americans trying to get their loved ones home, while navigating their broader views on the conflict. We had this realization that this was not just a story about a hostage family, but a story about a family navigating the kind of schisms and fractures that are happening within families and communities all over the world.
Lance: The film is not expressly political, but politics is a core dimension of what each one of the family members has to confront in the processing of the situation, and in their own grief. In some cases, politics is a way of avoiding grief.
It’s not just a matter of differing positions. The politics gets blended into the emotional response and we felt that this was common, these things don’t fit into neat boxes. Seeing a family navigate those dimensions could offer people a window into how they might process their own feelings. It’s not to preach to anyone, to say a person is right or wrong. By the audience seeing the family, it gives them permission to feel anything themselves, whereas there are so many reminders now to armor up, double down or walk away. Hopefully this gives people room to be in their own messiness. There were plenty of people who discouraged us from dealing with a political dimension, but we felt it was important not to shy away.
What do you know about Yehuda, Chaya and their beliefs—have they shifted since the filmmaking wrapped?
Brandon: I think being protagonists of the film has had a pretty profound impact on them. I was just with Liat and her oldest son in Kiryat Gat where she lives right now, watching the film with Ofri (Liat’s oldest) for the first time. It’s so interesting that when the family watches it, they are experiencing not just the moments of their own realities but also other family members’ experiences and perspectives on one another.
This movie is called Holding Liat. After she comes home, the film switches to her point of view. It becomes a portrait of her.
Brandon: It was a natural evolution. Liat was in captivity for 54 days. She had this very unique experience in captivity, in that she was a hostage, her husband was murdered, her kids were almost killed, and yet her captors treated her with a relative amount of humanity and respect, given the circumstances.
That blew my mind. The amount of empathy that she could have was fascinating.
Brandon: Yeah. Life is full of contradictions. As filmmakers, Lance and I look for contradictions and opportunities to allow those gray areas to be elevated and show through. The fact that she went through something like this and also emerged with stories of genuine human connection on the other side, feelings of empathy towards the suffering of Palestinians, it felt like the story needed to end with her and her processing of the experience. Audiences being able to bear witness to the very complex experience she was having in the days and weeks after being released gives all of us who are watching a space to emotionally walk with her. The film offers no easy answers.
Liat continues to ask hard questions about what led to October 7 and where to go from here. I imagine this film may have gotten pushback from some within the Jewish community, from people who see things in more black-and-white terms.
Lance: It has actually been the reverse. It has been profoundly embraced by different film spaces—at Berlinale where it won Best Documentary, and then a month or so later where it won the top award at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival. Many synagogues and Jewish centers on all different points of the ideological spectrum want to screen this film. The people who have seen it have shared how moved they’ve been, or perhaps even surprised by how much they connected. The response when we screened it in Israel was overwhelmingly positive.
How did making this film change you, from beginning to end?
Brandon: A few weeks ago when we went to Israel/Palestine, I had two different conversations still seared in my head and my heart. One was with Liat after watching the film with her oldest son. Her oldest son wasn’t ready to watch the film yet, an indication of how hard this has been for him. Then she made an affirmation that there was no choice but for her to survive and to seek empathy and human connection amidst this tragedy. She had just met with this Palestinian woman who was a grieving widow, and the two of them were speaking together. Then a few days later I was in the West Bank at Masafer Yatta, the community documented in No Other Land. I was sitting with a Palestinian woman and her three children. She described for me the near daily violent attacks that her family experiences from settlers, and how her kids (age 3, 5 and 7) keep asking her who the people are that are attacking them, tearing down their homes, coming into their neighborhoods and being violent. She refused to tell the children who they are because she does not want to raise her children with hatred in their hearts for anybody. So having this shared experience of two mothers enduring horrific violence on both sides of the fence, and choosing empathy and humanity over revenge, retribution and hatred, has left me with a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark time.
Lance: I would just add that on a personal level, this has been a huge exercise in confronting all kinds of fears, at every step of the way. I will carry the experience of making it with me for the rest of my life.
Holding Liat continues to screen at film festivals, and has secured a future theatrical release in the United States. For more information and to watch the trailer, visit the website here.
Top image: Brandon (left) and Lance (right) Kramer. Credit: Meridian Hill Pictures.