There’s something familiar yet exciting about showing up in the morning waiting for a new day of screenings to start at a film festival. I got to the Lamar Street Alamo a little early on day two of SXSW 2025. The volunteers of the fest have been instructed to start handing out queue cards for each movie an hour before each screening starts. I arrived with about 90 minutes to spare before my chosen first screening for the day, The Spies Among Us, was to begin.
So, I sat in the mid-morning sunshine at Alamo and people watched while waiting to get my first ticket. It was a dramatic change from the previous weekend, when Rae and I attended the 20th anniversary film fest celebration of the one movie podcast I listen to, Filmspotting. That quick, three-day fest took place in Filmspotting’s birthplace, Chicago, where the windchill was in the single digits for most of the weekend. Avoiding frostbite was a priority for that fest. The first weekend of SXSW in Austin was sunny and in the 70s, fostering a relaxing atmosphere of soaking up the rays and enjoying the lovely weather.
It's exciting to be among so many like-minded people. We’re all here for the same thing: to see movies. I eavesdrop in these interregnum moments to hear what people are saying about the fest. Mostly I hear conversations about what’s been seen and what will be screened. “What have you seen so far?” “What are you seeing today?” When you get to a venue like this, with dozens of screenings happening each day, if you get there early enough, and have to wait, you can see people coming in and going out like the tide as they come to get screening queue cards, then wait for their ticket type to be called, then disappear into the hallway of screening rooms for their chosen cinematic adventure. It’s exhilarating to see so many people of different shapes and sizes, colors and creeds, coming together to create this ephemeral, temporary community.
My first catch of the day was the aforementioned The Spies Among Us, a harrowing documentary about life under the Ministry for State Security, also known as the Stasi, the repressive secret police force that acted as the enforcement arm of the 40-year dictatorship controlling East Germany between roughly the 1950s and the very early 1990s.
I was nine-and-a-half-years old when the Berlin Wall came down, and, like one of the directors said in the post-screening Q&A, basically all Americans learned about the period of enforced separation during the Cold War was that Ronald Reagan at some point said, “Tear down that wall,” and that David Hasselhoff danced on top of it as it fell. We have no concept of the terror that lived in people’s hearts and lives under the constant threat of being turned in to the Stasi for being a political dissident. I enjoy the Cold War action movie Atomic Blonde as much as the next person, but it flattens an entire horrific era of history into a flashy spy entertainment.
The subject of The Spies Among Us is Peter Keup, a famous dancer in East Berlin who changed his entire life purpose to become a journalist and historian in the wake of devastating news he received after the Soviet dictatorship was ousted from power in the waning days of 1989. Peter discovers that his own brother was a spy for the Stasi, and he informed on both Peter and their mother during the repressive regime. Before the Berlin Wall fell, Peter had decided to escape East Germany via train. His brother’s report to the Stasi caused him to be arrested at the border and thrown in prison by the Stasi.
Some of the cast and crew of The Spies Among Us (Peter Keup is second from the right) (photo by the author)
In a sickening echo of The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s sobering 2012 meditation on the cruelties of dictatorship, the directors of The Spies Among Us, Jamie Coughlin Silverman and Gabriel Silverman, obtain the cooperation of the last surviving member of the leadership of the Stasi, the terrorist group that ruined so many East German lives. This man – who I’ll refer to only as Whatever Guy, because of a knit cap he wears prominently throughout a tour he takes the filmmakers on, and because that’s all he deserves – is completely unrepentant about the harms he caused, even when confronted, twice, by Peter about his crimes. Whatever Guy was on top under the repressive regime, so it was all good, as far as he’s concerned. It makes one feel hopeless when someone like this refuses to accept his guilt for destroying people’s lives.
It also makes one fear about the same thing happening here, since Donald Trump is laser-focused on becoming America’s version of a dictator.
I had a stumble after my first screening. I decided to take a shuttle to the Paramount to try and catch the movie screening right before Death of a Unicorn, the new title from A24 and a hotly anticipated screening. The idea was to catch the preceding movie, then, when it was over, hop back in line for Death of a Unicorn. Even though I left the post-screening Q&A of The Spies Among Us early, and I had almost exactly an hour to get downtown to the Paramount, my lovely and helpful shuttle driver was no match for the snarl of traffic she had to navigate. I ended up at the Paramount twenty minutes after the screening I was trying to make had started. On top of that, the wonderfully helpful volunteer at that theater told me that the line for Death of a Unicorn (screening at 5:30) would start at four, but that several “officially unsanctioned” lines were already forming, and that those people would pounce as soon as the clock struck four.
That all sounded very exhausting, so I hopped on another shuttle (burning another 30 minutes) heading back to the Lamar Alamo to catch a few more titles. My second movie of the day was a documentary called Starman. The film focuses on Gentry Lee, an octogenarian who played a crucial role in the earliest days of NASA and segued into a career as a popular science-fiction writer. That’s a paltry description of this space pioneer’s incredibly full life. I must confess that I had never heard of Gentry Lee, but his closest friends and colleagues, personal heroes of mine Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, held him in the highest esteem. While Starman succumbs at times to the documentary pitfall of simply letting its subject talk directly into the camera for most of the film’s runtime, hearing about what this man did throughout his life is engaging and awe-inspiring.
From left to right: Gentry Lee, SXSW moderator Bart Weiss, and Starman’s director, Robert Stone (photo by the author)
My last film of the day was the documentary Speadsheet Champions. Like the heartwarming documentary We Can Be Heroes, Spreadsheet Champions enters the world of highly engaging, sensitive, and intelligent kids discovering who they are through very specific interests. We Can Be Heroes, which I discovered at last year’s SXSW, is about kids at a larping camp. Spreadsheet Champions focuses on kids participating in Microsoft’s high-stakes competition of its three most-widely used apps: Word, Power Point, and Excel. The filmmakers focused on the Excel spreadsheet branch of the competition, and the bright, precocious kids we meet over the course of the picture restores at least a little hope in our future. There are six in total; one is from Cameroon, one is shy and quiet, but the star of the movie is undoubtedly Mason Braithwaite, a determined and infectiously positive kid who shines in front of the camera. These kids form lasting bonds with each other and with their obsession, and it’s a delight to watch it happen.
One of the stars of Spreadsheet Champions, Mason Braithwaite (center) (photo by the author)