“Take No Prisoners” Captivates SXSW Audiences with Inside Look at High-Stakes US Hostage Negotiations

At turns heart-wrenching and exhilarating, P3 Media’s “Take No Prisoners” debuted March 8 at the 2025 South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, laying bare the high-stakes world of U.S. hostage negotiations from multiple perspectives.

Offering unprecedented access to the families embroiled in international intrigue, the documentary features the journalistic chops of P3’s Adam Ciralsky, who embedded for 15 months with Roger Carstens, America’s top hostage negotiator at that time. “Take No Prisoners” chronicles Carstens’ efforts to free Los Angeles public defender Eyvin Hernandez from “The House of Dreams,” a notorious Venezuelan prison.

From tense White House meetings to chaotic Caracas streets, the film offers unique, behind-the-scenes footage documenting the setbacks, breakthroughs, and relentless determination required to triumph in the dangerous world of U.S. hostage recoveries.

This Is the Raw Power of Documentary Storytelling

“Ciralsky masterfully captures Carstens’ unflappable negotiating poise and juxtaposes it with the demoralizing anxiety the families advocating for the release of their loved ones endure. This is the raw power of documentary storytelling,” said Ashley Bell, a P3 board member and executive producer on the project alongside frequent entrepreneurial partner Bernice King, the youngest daughter of slain civil rights icon Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Radhika Jones, David Friend, Precious Mayes, and Jatali Bellanton also served as executive producers.

Bell and King founded Ready Entertainment to create movies and TV shows with strong social justice messages and solidified their reach by partnering with P3 Media in 2024.

“These are the projects the world needs to see, internalize and then decide what role they can personally play in disrupting the status quo,” Bell added.

Hernandez was intercepted by Venezuelan forces and jailed in a maximum-security prison for “criminal association and conspiracy” after joining a friend on a trip to the Colombian-Venezuelan border to resolve a passport issue. The film chronicles the nerve-wracking negotiations to bring him home after Venezuelan authorities imprisoned him in March 2022 for not paying a bribe.

Meanwhile, both Carstens and Bell were recently appointed to the board of directors for the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which has worked since 2014 to reunite more than 140 Americans held captive in foreign countries with their families. The foundation’s namesake, James W. Foley, was an American teacher, humanitarian, and independent conflict journalist who was kidnapped on Thanksgiving Day 2012 while reporting in Syria and murdered nearly two years later by the Islamic State (ISIS). Within 16 days of his senseless August 2014 slaughter, Foley’s family and friends launched the Foley Foundation to advocate for American hostages and wrongful detainees held abroad and to promote journalist safety.