They Took Them Alive
2016 · 19m · United States
Directed by Emily Pederson
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
More than two years after 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa in Mexico, their loved ones still seek justice and closure.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about abduction that refuses sensationalism or true-crime theater—it's almost *boring* how restrained it is, which is exactly why it works and why everyone else will sleep on it.
The formal architecture here is impeccable: a crime doc that abandons forensics entirely in favor of sustained, almost elegiac portraiture, situating itself against the glut of exploitation documentaries through sheer compositional discipline.
The choice to hold on faces in silence rather than cut to talking heads or archival footage—that single decision transforms what could've been tabloid material into something genuinely haunting and intimate.
Reviews
With They Took Them, her debut film, Pederson captures scenarios and especially conversations that might have eluded her still camera, and navigates new challenges in terms of factoring for time, bringing a more obtrusive apparatus into intimate settings and exchanging depth of information for depth of emotion.