Darren Aronofsky produced by Israeli hostage doctor

It is impossible to know how you would react if a large historical tragedy would hit your family. Would you adjust everything to focus completely on your personal accidents, do everything you can to do things to better with your loved ones? Or would you also try, if the circumstance allowed, to see things in a broader context, to question how such a tragedy managed to happen in the first place?

This is a dilemma in the center of a politically powerful and emotional capture of a new documentary film Holding the clayAs follows two older parents faced with the abduction of their daughter during Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, offering a rare view of all lobbying, moral testing and endless waiting included in the affair that lasted almost two months, Director Brandon Kramer performs an impressive job revealing personal and geopolitical aspects of the heart true story.

The film, which premiered on the sidebar on Berlin, manages to vote the criticisms of the Israeli government and its ardent supporters and remains compassionate for the victims of the massacre whose consequences are still felt around the world. At a time when people feel obliged to choose on which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict standing, Holding the clay Takes a thoughtful environment that exposes the situation without taking advantage of it. Whether the American distributor wants to touch the division of hot potatoes is another question, but Kramer’s movie certainly deserves attention.

Forty -nine -year -old history teacher Liat Bein’s Atzoli and her husband Aviv were Nir Oz Kibbutz’s residents, when Hamas militants broke through the border on October 7, killing over a thousand Israelites and took hundreds of other hostages. The documentary starts a few weeks after the attack, when Liat retired parents, Yehuda and Chay, are desperate to ask for news of their daughter and son -in -law.

As a couple of Americans who emigrated to Israel in the 1970s, where they raised Liat and her younger sister Tal, Beinini consider their lives completely when we first met them. While Chay returns home to be with the rest of her family, Yehuda is soon moving to Washington, DC, where she joins other parents and relatives to lobby for hostages.

It is clear from the beginning that Yehuda is not a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current Israeli regime, and he certainly does not fit the cliché of Zionists who waves the flag. Thrown out in the T -shirt “Good Morning Vietnam” and dealt with the Bernie Bumper sticker on his car, he is a pious leftist who came to Israel, hoping to be placed in a country filled with socialist Kibbutzim, only to discover her that he ruled the Coalition decades later Religious fundamentalists and extreme right countries, with a corrupt leader on top.

While in Washington, Yehuda tries to force senators and congress people to negotiate with Hamas for the handover Liata and Aviv, although he remained unknown for the second time. Extremely refusing to satisfy the faction he has stuck with, Yehuda cannot help open his mouth and get into problems. “We are led by crazy people, whether on the Israeli or Palestinian side,” complains, as everyone constantly tells him to play an emotional angle, not politically. This includes his daughter Tal, who is difficult to refuse to rejection of his father to Kowtow politicians. “Do you think I wanted to meet Mitch McConnell, that fucking asshole?!” She yells at him, in a scene that would make a good Jewish comedy that the situation was not so tragic.

Particularly sad is Nette’s case, one of Liat’s three children, who survived the attack. What happened seriously influenced, and unlike his grandfather, he doesn’t talk about Biba or Gazi. There is a scene in which he sits with Yehud in the back of the car after an event of collecting funds, and the two are unable to talk to each other. It seems that the gap between them reflected a larger Jag, which separated several generations of Israelites-from the old leftist idealists such as Yehude to their teenage grandchildren, who grew up in a broken world who made them more fatal.

Kramer focuses on these moments in the early part Holding the clayoffering a lucid portrait of a family divided by a conflict that directly affects them while echoing around the world. The other half of the movie, which is not worth it to spoil for the emotional weight it carries, moves from political to personally as Yehuda, Chay, their children and grandchildren are worn with the reality of disaster.

If there are moments when Kramer is definitely turning on the plumbing, with the result of Jordan Dykstra (20 Depour’s Allebal Stead;) Increasing the impact of such scenes, the film remains more even an event over so much outside, whether on TV or on social networks. Particularly touching is the closing scene set at the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem, in which the film tries to pull the connection between the walls erected around the Warsaw ghetto and those who divide the gauze from neighboring Israel. Some will no doubt find a comparison of controversial, but for the Bein family it is a reality in which they have now experienced firsthand, and she is still clinging to that life inevitably continues.