The doc program at SXSW reflects the left-of-center tone of both the festival and the city of Austin. Where else would you find documentaries about The Butthole Surfers and Carl Lewis in the same program? With such a relatively short festival, it can be hard to get to the non-fiction selections. Still, I was lucky enough to check out a trio that premiered on opening weekend, and they’re all testaments to human resilience, profiles of people who survived impossible conditions to become the people they are today.
The best of the trio is Rodney Ascher’s “Ghost Boy,” the story of Martin Pistorius, a man who overcame an impossible nightmare. Ascher’s films (“Room 237,” “The Nightmare,” “A Glitch in the Matrix”) often spiral in on themselves as they tell stories of introverted obsession. I have often found Ascher’s work a little relentless, but that approach perfectly fits the story here as Ascher isn’t just profiling people whose life choices or beliefs have made them a bit unusual but someone who was locked in his own body through no choice of his own. Pistorius is a forthcoming interview subject, telling his life story as Ascher cuts to fascinatingly staged recreations. They’re not traditional true-crime versions of what we’re hearing over narration—they’re sequences filmed very clearly on stages, complete with cameras and crew people visible in shots. This approach to “cinematic autobiography” adds another layer of complex non-fiction storytelling to a movie that tells a story you won’t soon forget.
When he was 12, Martin Pistorius developed a neurological condition that trapped him in his own body, unable to move. He could still think, feel, and dream, but he was in a vegetative state from which most people around him presumed he would never emerge. For years, he was fed and cared for by people who would go about their lives around him with little awareness of what was happening in Martin’s mind. Ascher uses new interviews with Martin and passages from his memoir to convey his impossible condition, but he admits he doesn’t have vibrant memories of a lot of this time and nothing before he descended into his nightmare. He’s had to piece together a lot from other reports, and one feels a sense of collaboration between Pistorius and Ascher to tell this story as accurately and emotionally as possible.
Because it’s a hell of a story. One of Martin’s caretakers became convinced that more was going on behind Martin’s eyes than anyone believed. She spoke to him and sensed a response. Needless to say, she’s a true hero, someone who helped Martin express himself by using his eyes to look at words and communicate with the outside world for the first time in years. From there, Martin trained himself back to reality. Today, he can type his responses to questions for the film and even has a family of his own. One of Ascher’s best decisions is not to cut away from Pistorius when he types out an answer to a question, often taking many seconds to tap out a response before we hear it. It’s a reminder of how difficult it is for Martin to communicate.
And yet he does. Often through his eyes and his smile. Ascher loves Martin’s face, lingering on it as we hear his answer over his visage or a passage from his book. Some of the recreations feel a bit overdone, especially a forced feeding one that plays out like a horror film. Still, Ascher consistently comes back to present-day Pistorius every time the construct of the film threatens to get away from him. It’s all there in that unforgettable face. As it always was, even when everyone had given up on him, it’s in those eyes.
Another uncommon story of human resilience unfolds in Grace Hughes-Hallett’s “The Secret of Me,” a timely film in an era when our administration is staging an all-out war on everyone that doesn’t fit into their neat boxes of men and women. And yet its subject, Jim Ambrose, makes clear that this is not a traditional trans story. It’s about the complex spectrum of gender and how attempts to simplify that complexity have led to unimaginable pain and trauma.
Jim Ambrose grew up as Kristi, always uncomfortable in her body in a way that made her parents uneasy. In her teens, Kristi learned the truth—she was born intersex, and an inexperienced doctor named Richard Carter assigned her female at birth, conducting an operation that may have altered a physical being but didn’t “fix” what was inside. The consistent message of “The Secret of Me” is an important one in 2025: No one should decide the gender presentation of someone else. Ever. Especially not a rookie doctor with no experience in the field.
Hughes-Hallett spends most of her time with the brave and moving Ambrose, but she also effectively profiles some other key figures in the intersex movement, including Tiger Devore and Bo Laurent, along with the Rolling Stone journalist who broke one of the biggest stories in this timeline in 1997 when he wrote about David Reimer, someone who was destroyed by the false reporting of a doctor named John Money. The Reimer story is truly tragic, evidence of how dangerous it is for people like Money to profit off uninformed beliefs.
Hughes-Hallett sometimes falls victims to tropes of the genre like over-use of re-creations—we don’t need to see an actor playing a villainous Money in his office, for example. Her greatest asset is her deep empathy for people like Jim. That’s what we all need to find right now for those under attack. “The Secret of Me” could help.
Another timely documentary from SXSW this year centers the increased number of international arrests and the people trying to help loved ones bring their family members home. The world heard the story of Brittney Griner, but she was far from alone as governments like those in Russia and Venezuela often imprison high-profile subjects as a means to an end, using them as pawns in a political game while they subject these innocent people to torture.
“Take No Prisoners” profiles Roger Carstens, the top U.S. hostage negotiator, as he works to obtain the release of Eyvin Hernandez, an L.A. public defender being held in a notoriously brutal Venezuelan prison. Carstens explains how they have shifted to a mindset that elevates the families of hostages, visiting with them, keeping them informed, and hearing their concerns. Some of the Carstens & Hernandez family material feels a little forced here—Carstens often plays to the camera—and directors Adam Ciralsky and Subrata De sometimes feel like they’re interested in but scared of one of their most fascinating ideas: How Carstens has become relatively famous via the pain of others. There’s a riveting sequence wherein Carstens is being feted by a lot of people in high-priced suits while Eyvin’s relatives question how much is really being done to bring him home. No one goes as far as to suggest that Carstens isn’t doing everything he can—it’s a hero profile film, for sure—but the dichotomy of a man who travels in the highest, richest circles of government fighting to release another man who’s not even being fed could have been dug into a bit deeper.
The key to the success of “Take No Prisoners” is the access granted Ciralsky & De, and how they use it. Going behind the scenes of international negotiations has an immediacy that we haven’t often seen. I’m not sure the film succeeds on a big-picture level regarding how regimes are using people for political capital, but it definitely works as a profile piece for both Carstens and the people who prayed for Eyvin Hernandez every day.
Pushing all its political avoidances aside, the thing I’ll remember most about “Take No Prisoners” is the unflagging hope of Eyvin’s father. He woke up every day confident that it was the one in which he’d see his son again. Next time a person like Eyvin Hernandez is being held prisoner, I’ll think about his father. And if more people in power do the same, “Take No Prisoners” will have done some good too.
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