High-profile hostage negotiations often grab headlines, but the arduous process of setting hostage Americans free has been kept secret — until now

Take No Prisoners, a documentary that premiered at the 2025 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival, follows the Salvadoran American family of Eyvin Hernandez in Los Angeles as they fight to free him from a notoriously brutal prison in Venezuela where he was wrongfully held hostage after going on vacation.

It spotlights the work of Roger Carstens, who worked as a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs in the United States from 2020 to 2025. He spearheaded Hernandez’s case and by allowing a crew to follow him throughout the process, gave audiences a glimpse at the complex and clandestine negotiations that must occur to set hostages free.

Directors Adam Ciralsky and Subrata De spoke with Yahoo Entertainment about the film.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you uncover this story and decide that it was a good subject for a documentary?

Ciralsky: It started with a rooftop conversation with Roger Carstens in August 2022. He mentioned in passing that 25% of his workload as a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs involved people in Venezuela. I thought, “That’s unusual, tell me more!” Long story short, a month or so later, I end up on the tarmac down in San Antonio when two planes came in carrying seven people — five Citgo executives, plus Osman Khan and Matthew Heath. Seven people walked off an airplane, and it was an unbelievably emotional reunion that was very difficult to capture on an iPhone. I was crying and everyone was crying. I’ve never been hit with seven families reuniting like that. But that joy very quickly turned into something else when we realized Eyvin Hernandez had been left behind. He’s an L.A. County public defender who our government left in the House of Dreams, this hellhole prison in South America.

De: Throughout our collaborative relationship, which has spanned over 20 years, the stories of hostages have haunted us. In every historical moment — every story in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Venezuela — we’ve seen it as a brutal, geopolitical kind of swordplay with human lives. It was really important for us that it was more than just a talking point, for people to understand the true cost of it. We all know the headlines about high-profile hostages, but there are always countless others. Who are those families who don’t have the same resources to get that time and attention?

Ciralsky: We knew that the family got a call from the U.S. government saying, “Your loved one, Eyvin, is not coming home,” and it was for a very bureaucratic reason. He wasn’t technically designated as wrongfully detained. When someone is wrongfully detained, it’s like a bomb goes off in the family.

De: You can’t really live a life. There are a lot of Hollywood versions of this, but the reality is far more stark and brutal.

Ciralsky: By having cameras present, I think we saw two things: One was the incredible faith that this family has that somehow, some way, Roger was going to find a way to get Eyvin out. We had no idea how long this would take, how much it would cost and where we would have to go. I went to seven countries and we filmed in three of them. The other thing is that Eyvin’s family from Compton, whose interactions with the federal government had been minimal at best like most people, goes from having no political power — no juice — and they transform into this incredibly powerful lobbying shop. It’s an amazing thing for someone like Pedro, Eyvin’s father, who was not born in this country and has limited education, to be invited to the White House to make his case and it works.

I was struck by the opening of the documentary, which states that dozens of Americans are currently being held hostage and the methods used to effect their release have been shrouded in secrecy until now. Why do you think that is?

De: The government and all the people at the heart of this will tell you it’s because the risk is so high because it involves a human right. I think they say, “There’s just too much back and forth.” But once you take a peek at the actual process, you realize that despite all of the heart that goes into it, there is also a lot of bureaucracy. Like any institutional thing where different organizations are meant to cooperate, there can be roadblocks to that. And nobody wants that to be public, right? But families talk about that a lot. Out of respect for the process and because the end goal is to get a family member out, everybody just kind of goes with it. Also, if you look at what happens when hostages get released, you are often trading really bad people for really good people. That’s a hard thing to see, but that’s the reality of it.

Ciralsky: The countries that take Americans hostage are not our allies. They’re our worst, most fraught adversaries. It’s a really bitter pill to swallow that we have to move to their beat and make deals, whether it’s the “Narco nephews” and Alex Saab [traded for the seven hostages freed from] Venezuela or Victor Boot for Brittany Griner in Russia. The government likes to keep this top secret because it’s an asymmetric weapon.

Why do you think Roger — and the U.S. government — spend so much time dealing with hostages in Venezuela, specifically?

Ciralsky: At the time we were filming, you have to look at the results that a leader like Nicolás Maduro has had in detaining U.S. citizens. He was able to get attention from the U.S. government and backchannel conversations about some things that were personally important, and some high-profile convicted criminals held in the U.S.

De: Venezuela is a strategic adversary, but it’s not at the top of the list — North Korea, Iran, Russia and China come first. But by taking Americans captive, this is their way of ringing our bell. They get our attention.

Ciralsky: Some actions by our government led their government to take Americans. The detainment of Alec Saab was on their minds as a motivator to take Americans. It’s a very medieval practice that continues. Hostage-taking is a biblical plague that continues to this moment.

I know you didn’t know how the film would end — that Eyvin would be reunited with his family — when you started filming. Would you have kept following the story until he was back home?

De: When it began, we knew that we were going to follow Roger’s work, and then we became committed to Eyvin’s family. That carried us through. Take No Prisoners is about both the promise and the peril of documentary filmmaking.

Ciralsky: It promises you can have a hell of an ending, which we got, but I’ll tell you — there was a lot of peril. There was a six-month period where it was not only ugly, it was unsafe, and our relationship as a country with Venezuela was just cratering. It’s like the floor opened up and there was another dungeon. We had nothing between June 2023 and December 2023 when we heard that a deal was in the works.

I read that Roger Carstens is no longer working as a special envoy since President Trump took office. What’s he doing now?

De: He’s an amazing American patriot and public servant and he will continue to be that. But not having him on the case anymore is part of why this story is so important. He brought a lot of people home.

Ciralsky: This is the hostage enterprise — victory knows a thousand fathers and failure’s an orphan. Roger felt that every day. He would go home every night and all he’d think about were the people he was failing. Every time he’d get out someone like Brittney Griner, Evan Gershkovich or Paul Whelan, other people would take credit for it, but they weren’t the ones at 2 a.m. taking calls from the family. This has become a sexy area of foreign policy where everyone seems to run for the soccer ball. There’s a scene where he’s in their living room — what other area of government is there an official who’s coming to your house to cry with you, drink with you, eat with you and plan with you? Roger took that on. You could see him, over the course of this film, aging.

Take No Prisoners premiered on March 8 at South by Southwest.