Lisa Laman’s SXSW 2025 Reviews PART THREE: Lingering espionage trauma and Milwaukee mayhem

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SXSW 2025 has come to an end! All the music acts, movie stars, and other entertainment head honchos have left Austin, TX for the year. Mighty events and motion picture premieres that folks had been anticipating for eons are now just more memories, destined to become images on the SXSW site promoting future incarnations of the festival. It’s always bittersweet when such a mighty art gathering concludes.

The Spies Among Us (dir. Gabriel and Jamie Coughlin Silverman)

The Spies Among Us does not start off on the best note. The feature begins with a rather standard prologue before shifting into a brief montage full of clips teasing what’s to come in the runtime, including primary subject Peter Keup, an East German victim of the secret police force Stasi, holding up a piece of paper and declaring “this is when I knew my brother was working for the Stasi.” Immediately afterward, directors Gabriel and Jamie Coughlin Silverman cut to a title card. It all feels too much like the preamble to a PBS program desperately trying to keep viewers from flipping to another channel.

It’s a strange kick-off that doesn’t benefit either this movie’s form (no visual motifs or distinctive filmmaking traits are established in this montage) or the heavy stories contained within The Spies Among Us. Luckily, after this awkward beginning, Spies Among Us settles into a more effective groove. This feature offers viewers a glimpse into what life was like in East Germany during its final decades, when the Stasi suppressed all possible opposition to the government or folks trying to leave the country. Kaup grew up in this tumultuous era and, once the barriers separating Germany went down, initially worked as a dance instructor. Then, decades later, he discovered his brother was a Stasi spy. Now Kaup had a new calling: historian.

In this job, Kaup eventually began interviewing folks who used to hold high positions of authority within the Stasi. Spies Among Us takes viewers into the lives of some of these people, including one former spy now running a museum full of old German memorabilia out of his own home. The nonchalant attitude of these souls about either their complicity or active participation in cruelty isn’t surprising, but that doesn’t negate its shockingness. This is how the horrors of history repeat themselves, by folks normalizing the unspeakable. Easily the best of these sequences focuses on an ex-Stasi officer walking through his former headquarters, now converted into a museum chronicling East Germany’s history.

The walls and rooms are familiar to this man, yet they now serve to highlight humans rights transgressions of yesteryear rather than give him authority over others. Watching him just glide around the place or opening the door for incoming tourists is simultaneously compelling and eerie. A pivotal figure in a dark chapter in German history is now just another face in the crowd. The intersection of the past and present informs the creative highpoints of Spies Among Us. Unfortunately, this material doesn’t inspire especially distinctive visuals or intriguing subversions of the documentary form. What testimonies and material are contained on-screen, though, prove engaging enough to keep the proceedings competent. Just grit your teeth through that peculiar opening.

Now! More Yes! (dir. Max Hey)

You may not have heard of TW Hansen, but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he’s nothing short of a local legend. He’s also the central subject of the documentary Now! More! Yes! A man with a self-proclaimed affinity for “weird sh*t”, cars, homegrown cinema, and using his boss’s credit card, Hansen leads an incredibly eccentric life. Filmmaker Max Hey chronicles Hansen’s day-to-day existence after he makes hastily purchases an ambulance from the 1980s. The fallout of this costly decision is intercut with interview from Hansen’s neighbors and friends, who all attest that this legally blind soul is impossible to forget.

TW Hansen is an undeniably engaging and endearing soul to follow for an entire movie. A ramshackle guy who always seems to be selling something, he’s also charmingly candid about the things that make him get up in the morning. At one point, Hansen simply remarks that he likes movies because they feature fast cars while his passion for automobiles emanated from the simple fact that they were in movies. These distinctive and entertaining remarks are scattered all throughout Now! More1 Yes! Plus, the guy’s easygoing demeanor makes it hard not to root for him in the bizarre scenarios he’s gotten himself into.

After all, how many other documentaries feature a guy trying to rebuild crumbling ambulance that should never be on the road again? A similarly idiosyncratic nature permeates the interview segments of Now! More! Yes!, with various Milwaukee residents using colorful and candid language to describe the area’s nightlife and music-heavy culture scene. None of this material is filmed especially distinctively nor does it result in something super thought-provoking. However, for 74 minutes of cinema, TW Hansen’s saga thoroughly keeps one’s attention. How could it not when Hey’s camera captures sights like Hansen’s giddiness over filming a car dropping to the ground from a great height?

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2025-03-18 18:25