Life under ICE is like a horror movie.
That’s the message of Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, whose new short documentary They’re Here chronicles how Immigration Customs Enforcement troops invaded and occupied Minneapolis last year, and the anonymous residents who resisted.
Poitras co-directed They’re Here with Minneapolis-based journalist and documentarian Rachel Lauren Mueller. Using dashcam footage, ground-level filming and crowdsourced data visualizations, they reconstruct the resistance network and their tactics to track, document, and combat ICE’s masked agents.
Stylistically, the film draws from horror and sci-fi cinema to depict how a picturesque American Midwestern city is turned into a dystopian nightmare. Men in balaclavas in unmarked cars drive down quiet snowy streets. At the Minneapolis airport, American vacationers gaze out the windows at shackled prisoners being dragged onboard planes nearby. A husband and wife hide in the trunk of a car as their son tries to sneak them past ICE officers.
They’re Here is Poitras’s first project since her Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the festival’s Golden Lion in 2022 and later earned an Oscar nomination. Poitras previously won the best documentary Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, her landmark account of Edward Snowden and his NSA surveillance disclosures.
