Brandon Kramer's 'Holding Liat' won the Best Documentary Award at the ongoing Berlin Film Festival 2025. It follows the story of two elderly parents facing the kidnapping of their daughter during the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023.
As per the synopsis on Berlinale, Liat is forcibly abducted from her kibbutz by members of Hamas on 7 October 2023. Director Brandon, in the documentary, covers the parents of Liat--Yehuda and Chaya as they try to deal with their fear or to sway the fate of their adult daughter and her husband in dialogue with the authorities.
The Berlinale Documentary Award is endowed with 40,000 euros in prize money. The prize money is split between the winning film's director and producer. Winning the award also entitles a film to take part in the competition for the Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature.
In 2025, 16 documentary forms from the sections Competition, Berlinale Special, Panorama, Forum and Generation were nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award. The prize money will be shared by the director and the producer of the winning film, as per the Berlinale website.
Earlier, The Berlin International Film Festival announced the winners of the 2025 Panorama Audience Awards, with Spanish drama Sorda (Deaf) by Eva Libertad taking the top prize for best feature film and German documentary Die Mollner Briefe (The Moelln Letters) in the Panorama Dokumente category on Sunday, reported The Hollywood Reporter.
The awards were decided by audience votes.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, the Spanish drama Sorda follows Angela (Miriam Garlo) and Hector (Alvaro Cervantes), an inter-abled couple in Spain preparing for the birth of their child. Angela, who is deaf, is surrounded by a strong community of deaf friends but struggles with pressure from her hearing parents to wear hearing aids.
After giving birth to a daughter, she begins to question whether she will be able to fully connect with her child and the world around her, a fear that places new strain on her relationship with her hearing husband Hector. It was directed by Eva Libertad.
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