Forget 1984! You don’t usually get a non-fiction look behind the curtain of the state security and secret police apparatus in a dictatorship. The Spies Among Us, a new documentary from Jamie Coughlin Silverman and Gabriel Silverman, the writing duo behind 2018’s TransMilitary, tries to change that. World premiering at the 2025 edition of South by Southwest on Saturday, it is described as “a rare look into the inner workings of a data-driven surveillance state run by one of the most feared secret police forces the world has ever known — East Germany’s Stasi.”
The film follows the personal investigation by Peter Keup, a Stasi victim-turned-historian, into family secrets. His search for answers takes a unique turn when he contacts and meets men who ran the system that tore apart his family in the former German Democratic Republic, including Heinz Engelhardt, the final living ex-leader of the Stasi. “These are the first conversations of their kind between Stasi officers and a victim,” a synopsis on the SXSW website highlights. “Through these meetings, a terrifying mosaic is built of the lengths people go to maintain power in a dictatorship, as well as the indomitable human spirit that seeks truth and self-determination.”
The film from SideXSide Studios was produced and directed by the Silvermans, with Gabriel Silverman also handling cinematography for the duo’s second feature doc. Gernot Grassl (How to Build a Truth Engine) is the editor on the doc.
The film debuts at SXSW, which runs March 7-15, but its genesis goes back a while. The filmmakers came to docs from the world of journalism. In 2013, they were invited to be part of a cultural exchange. “After the [Berlin] Wall came down, it was an opportunity for German and U.S. journalists to learn more about each other’s countries,” Gabriel Silverman tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It was on that trip that we learned about the topic. We were with the chief of staff for the former West Berlin mayor, and she mentioned, casually, ‘I have this file about me that I haven’t opened yet, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to’. It was just this idea and interesting question of: If you had the opportunity to open a file and upend your life, would you do it?”
When they dug into the topic more, they got “fascinated by this idea that the Stasi were really spending billions of dollars, an enormous amount of human resources, to capture the same type of data that we give away today for convenience, without really understanding the long-term implications,” he shares. “We were thinking about the idea for a long time, and in 2019, we actually started the project in earnest.”
The two filmmakers ended up visiting museums and educational venues about Stasi history, such as the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial. “We learned about the tactics that the Stasi used, which were created by the Russians and perfected by the Germans, as they say,” recalls Jamie Coughlin Silverman. “And I was just like: ‘Man, I can’t believe that I don’t know anything about this.’ I can’t believe that I don’t have any insight as an American into what actually happened behind the Iron Curtain, what that meant for people’s lived experiences, how that has echoed through history to today and how those relationships and those mindsets affect global economies and policy.’ It has rippled through to what you now see across German society and Eastern [European] societies and beyond.”
Adds her partner: “In U.S. society, you learn that [Ronald] Reagan told [Mikhail] Gorbachev to tear down the Wall, and then David Hasselhoff sang on it. But the details beyond that are non-existent from an American education standpoint.”
Overall, the doc is not so much focused on telling a historical story but more on “telling a story today about a man’s investigation into this past and why this matters to us today,” she explains to THR. “Allowing surveillance to happen, participating in surveillance, taking data from others and what kind of power that creates in the world was just a fascinating topic for us in this time that we find ourselves in. Tech is fairly unrestrained in America, but is being a little bit more restrained in Europe, and you understand why” when exploring history.
She even learned German to be able to better approach people about the doc. “We started reaching out to Stasi officers, and it was clear that there was a skepticism for Stasi officers to engage with German press,” Gabriel Silverman tells THR. “Engelhardt, for example, really wanted to engage mostly directly with us. We had some interpreters in the early days, but it was clear that we needed to remove any type of barrier so we could have a smaller, scrappier, more intimate crew, so that there was another level of confidence. Scenes where Engelhart is giving us tours around Chemnitz or us in the basement of this museum were shot without interpreters, because Jamie deliberately wanted to have no barrier between her and them. Also, as an outsider, as a newcomer, she wanted them to explain things in the simplest terms and not fall back on some of the same arguments that they have been having for the last 35 years.”
For one scene showing Engelhardt returning to the Stasi headquarters and his office, the filmmakers needed special approval since former Stasi executives are usually not allowed there.
So how much does the film tie history to the present? “There are so many parallels to today,” Gabriel Silverman says. “But talking to former Stasi officers, that was oftentimes used for a deflection away from their own culpability. ‘You think that was bad. Well, what about today?’ We add a little bit of that into the film, because it’s an important context. But for us, it was most important that people can come to this without feeling judged today but seeing the problems caused when your neighbors turn on each other, when realities become fractured. A lot of that parallel to today is subtext for the entire film.”
That’s also one of the reasons why the filmmakers are excited to premiere The Spies Among Us at SXSW. “We feel this is a very good opportunity to have, where tech is present, those conversations around building surveillance systems that at their core have to have a moral idea or moral compass and thinking things through,” he argues. “We can not be assuming how this is going to turn out, because we don’t know, and we know from history that surveillance states can mutate and affect us for not just a few years but for generations afterwards.”
The psychological tools of suppression used by the Stasi live on, for example. “All of the tactics that they had back then are still being used now, and they’re not just being used in Russia,” explains Jamie Coughlin Silverman. “They’re being used across the world to impact the way people think, to impact the way they treat their neighbors, to impact and erode trust at the most basic level. We also saw this playbook rolled out in Syria. We just think it is such an important story to understand the way that people like this think. And showing that playbook in the film is one of the things that, to us, makes the story we are telling a very prescient, present-day story.”
Finding Peter as the protagonist who digs into his past and meets former Stasi people was key for the doc. Beyond the fact that he is fluent in English, he also brings the sensibility needed when dissecting a sensitive topic. “I immediately knew he was going to be the person,” she recalls. “He is a beautiful, eloquent speaker. He’s funny, he’s emotional and he’s just the most engaging person. We’ve become really close to him over the years.”
And Gabriel Silverman highlights: “One of the things that I give credit to all participants, both Peter and the Stasi officers, is the grace with which they approached the conversations. It wasn’t always easy, and it doesn’t always make people walk away feeling good, but at least there’s an attempt to bridge the divide, which is the thing that we need in all democratic societies, and trying to create a space of understanding.”
The filmmaking duo also took away lessons from the experience of making the doc. “One of the things I relearned was really trusting your subjects,” Gabriel Silverman shares. “Peter wasn’t an anti-regime organizer. He was just a regular guy who got caught up in the system, a normal guy whose family got swept up in the surveillance system. Peter is every man who carries with him the pain of that period and who hasn’t had a chance to talk about it.”