Award-winning German Syrian documentary director and cinematographer, Martina Radwan, screened the new Stranger Things documentary, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 at Missouri State University on September 21.
The documentary focused on the behind-the-scenes creative writing and cinematography process of the show’s final season. For three years, Radwan captured on screen the timeline of the show’s culmination.
After the screening, Radwan and the head of Missouri State University’s Department of Communication, Media, and Film Deborah Larson hosted a Q&A panel. The documentary director answered a variety of questions on the producing of documentaries as well as her style.
“I mean, for me…I’m coming from fiction, so it’s always storytelling, right?” said Radwan. “What can you tell humanity to enlighten and, you know, basically…how can you tell a story that creates a dialog with the audience as a whole but also individually?”
“I’m interested in layered stories,” she said. “It’s like I find it more interesting when it has layers...I find those stories a bit different.”
Radwan said they began the editing process and production of the documentary in October 2024 and were finished in November 2025. The documentary came out this year.
“It took that long to find the story because it was such a weave. And also, the chronological part of it…You have to stay with the chronology. It’s like I can’t find an initial season seven. And then they shoot season two, then they shoot season eight and then go back to two.”
She said she kept the audience, which was familiar with Stranger Things, in mind. “I couldn’t just go off the rails and ignore all that. But I also didn’t just want to make a chronological documentary when there’s not one and then two and three, because that’s not interesting and also not relevant…The edit room was such to me a perfect gift because I have never seen that before. Like nobody ever lets anybody in the edit room, and really, because I didn’t know what it means to write a script. You know, I thought they were sitting there with a computer. It’s like inventing stuff, like talking it out and then, mapping it out and then going back. And then also, I mean, the story is so convoluted and so big and had so many characters. How do you weave all that in? So yeah, I thought that was a huge gift, which was great.”
One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 is currently streaming on Netflix.