In Take No Prisoners, directors Adam Ciralsky and Subrata De were granted unprecedented access to Roger Carstens, America’s former top hostage negotiator, as he fights to secure the release of Eyvin Hernandez, an L.A. public defender imprisoned in Venezuela.
The documentary’s opening sequence could easily be mistaken for a scene from a Jason Bourne film. On a tarmac in Miami, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s nephews—convicted drug traffickers—are escorted onto a U.S. government plane, set to be exchanged for seven American detainees: Matthew Heath, Osman Khan, and the Citgo Five.
Ciralsky was the only journalist-filmmaker present at Joint Base San Antonio when the newly freed hostages arrived in the U.S.
A Different Focus
Rather than centering Take No Prisoners on this 2022 hostage recovery operation—the largest of its kind since the release of American detainees from Iran in 1981—Ciralsky and De shift their attention to Carstens’ ongoing mission to free Hernandez.
Hernandez, a Los Angeles County deputy public defender, traveled to Colombia in 2022 for a vacation. While there, he accompanied a friend to the Colombian-Venezuelan border to resolve a passport issue.
However, upon arrival, Venezuelan authorities intercepted them, accusing Hernandez of criminal association and conspiracy and imprisoning him in a maximum-security facility.
Roger Carstens (Photo: AP)“While there was plenty of gold in retelling the events leading up to the initial Miami release (of the seven Americans), as filmmakers, Subrata and I felt that the odyssey to rescue Eyvin might make for a compelling vérité documentary,”
says Ciralsky.
“We had no idea how difficult that would be, how long it would take, or how much it would cost.”
Inside the Negotiation Process
In 2022, Ciralsky received unprecedented permission from the Biden administration to embed in the hostage negotiation process alongside Carstens.
In a rare move, both the White House and Maduro’s government allowed Ciralsky to observe—and, in some cases, film—the diplomatic efforts that took place in locations ranging from Canouan in the Grenadines to Caracas, Venezuela.
Ciralsky later turned his time with Carstens into both a documentary and a 2024 Vanity Fair article titled Take No Prisoners.
The project was then optioned by Lionsgate Television, and Hulu is now developing it into a scripted series, The Envoy, with showrunner Alexi Hawley.