Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras spoke bluntly at the Venice Film Festival Monday about the motivations behind her latest project, They’re Here, a 25-minute documentary that viscerally chronicles the Minneapolis resistance movement to ICE’s paramilitary occupation last year.
“We believed in a sense of urgency in documenting this,” Poitras said of the film origins. “What we’re seeing in the United States is a nightmare, and we feel what’s happening in the mainstream media is that this kind of violence is being normalized. We believe very strongly in the power of cinema to denormalize this violence and to show what’s happening, so that you can feel the sense of terror.”
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.
Poitras co-directed They’re Here with Minneapolis-based journalist and documentarian Rachel Lauren Mueller. Told in the style of dystopian sci-fi cinema, the film starts in a picturesque wintry American Midwest landscape — but this is Trump’s America in 2025, where masked men are soon shown abducting children, as residents hide in the trunks of cars to safely get to work. Elsewhere, everyday American vacationers mill about at Minneapolis’ airport, gazing out the windows at shackled prisoners being dragged onboard planes nearby.
They’re Here draws on dashcam footage, crowdsourced data visualizations and ground-level footage to reconstruct the resistance network and the cat-and-mouse surveillance tactics used by residents and ICE’s masked agents.
“We were using the genres or language of dystopian cinema or horror to take us closer to reality, not to take us further away, and not to make fiction from reality,” Poitras explained in Venice. “This actually is the reality — the reality is a nightmare. The entire country is under attack, and immigrants are living in fear throughout the United States right now.”
“Over the two Trump terms, we’ve seen that things have gotten more extreme, but people become used to certain things,” added Mueller. “So I think the real role of this film is to shake that up a bit — to change things from a space of intellectualization about these numbers and these images that we see, and to have it become more visceral again.”
Poitras explained that the doc, like the resistance movement at its heart, emerged from a sense of solidarity with the immigrants who had made Minneapolis their home.
“It came from a real sense of, ‘These are our neighbors, and we don’t want them stolen from us. We want these people to stay safe,’” she said.
She also sees causes for both hope and despair in the Trump administration’s response to Minneapolis’ resistance, which she described as a “great success.”
“At the end of the film, we say how these tens and hundreds of thousands of residents responded, and that ICE removed 80 percent of its agents. So there was a real response to this kind of resistance, which I think we can all take hope from,” she explained. “At the same time, ICE has a budget of $70 billion, which is just an astronomical amount of money. Additionally, in the last two months, 90,000 people were abducted. So it’s this is a record high that has happened in June and July. So ICE is absolutely still active. Their tactics just look very different now.”
They’re Here is screening in Venice Open – Out of Competition, the festival’s nonfiction and special-presentation strand, and will have its world premiere in the Sala Grande on Monday afternoon. The film was produced by Mueller, Poitras and longtime Poitras collaborator Yoni Golijov, with ARTE France serving as co-producer. Submarine Entertainment Sales is handling U.S. sales.
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