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.

They’re Here is screening in Venice Open – Out of Competition, the festival’s nonfiction and special-presentation strand. Submarine Entertainment Sales is handling U.S. sales.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Poitras and Mueller talked about going where the news cameras weren’t, using horror film tropes to capture the horrific reality of an ICE invasion, and how they hope their film will shock Americans into taking action.

Let’s start with the origin story. How did the collaboration come together?

LAURA POITRAS: So we have a mutual colleague and dear friend of Rachel’s, Adam Mellion, who has worked with me as a researcher on my last two films. He was in New York City in January, the day that Renée Good was executed, and lives in South Minneapolis, which is where Rachel lives. We all had this sense of urgency, this need to document what’s happening. The fact that both Rachel and Adam are based there made it something that I felt it was really important to be involved with.

And you two immediately connected?

POITRAS: We have a lot of things in common. We’re both, like, director-shooters and journalists, so we were totally in sync from the very beginning. Rachel and I just started talking about how we were going to approach it, what was going to be different from the news. Source protection was also the very top of our list. How do we do this safely? How are we encrypting information?

Did you already have the connections to the groups that were organizing to track ICE agents and warn people?

RACHEL LAUREN MUELLER: I live six blocks from where Renée Good was executed. I live right in the thick of where a lot of ICE activity happens, and the neighborhood groups were organically popping up. I was in some of the groups that were remnants of what came up during George Floyd’s murder, so there was some infrastructure that existed beforehand that then very rapidly transitioned into these neighborhood surveillance groups or mutual aid groups.

My position as a neighbor was really essential to us getting access to some of these other groups. People were understandably very nervous about being on camera, letting a camera into the room. But I think the combination of me being from the city and understanding in a very visceral sense what this occupation felt like, in addition to Laura’s experience and understanding of surveillance and what was at stake, allowed people to be like, “All right, yes, you can come. You can come and film with us.”

Access felt very slow, but it actually happened over a very quick amount of time, and we were filming every day from the beginning of January through March, and then some of the footage in the film is from December. So it really covers a large time period.

What did you do to protect the people you were filming?

POITRAS: We used Encryption, anonymization, redaction, a review process, releases that allowed people to opt out before the film was locked. All that. In a way, the use of concealing the identities of the protagonists becomes also part of the kind of how the film communicates the risks involved, right? And hopefully, it puts the audience in their perspective.

Why did you think it was necessary to do this type of documentary, given that there was a massive amount of news coverage at the time?

POITRAS: I think we felt really, like, a strong belief that working from a cinematic approach can communicate in a different way than what the news is doing. There is a sense that the news is kind of normalizing this violence by repeating the same clips over and over. I don’t know that that is productive, and we felt that we could do something different with it.

And we have a belief in cinema and what it can do, and also a belief in documenting resistance. Pretty early on, we also started talking about genre. I was talking to Rachel and we were watching what was happening, and it was like a horror film — but it was also the reality of what was happening. So when we started cutting, we started using [elements of] that genre to communicate what was really happening. Not to get away from the reality, but to get us closer to the reality.

The visual style does have elements of a horror film. But also of sci-fi dystopia.

POITRAS: Totally. I mean, I’m thinking of Children of Men, where you’re, like, rounding up of immigrants. Dystopian cinema always tells something about today, right? That’s what sci-fi is always doing. It’s always about the present. We were trying to change the lens or the perspective to reflect back on a reality that’s happening. So we were interested in those genres, but always in order to get us closer to the reality of the situation, which is one about terror and menace and a hidden, almost alien force that is abducting people and shooting them in broad daylight.

What was your experience with ICE and the police while you were making the film? Did you come into any direct conflict?

MUELLER: The Minneapolis police were told they should not be involved with ICE at all, so they were not present. But the federal agents absolutely were around all the time. I awoke to the sounds of whistles, which was the alert system — it’s like, ICE is in the area — multiple times. They were on my small residential street all the time. There are many moments where ICE was there, and I’m present, and I’m filming. But also, we were very clear about not being where the news cameras were, and so thinking about how to create a frame where things are happening, unfolding in real time, so you can understand the kind of dystopia of it in a different way than the news does.

POITRAS: There’s a scene at the end when we’re in a car, and then somebody says, “ICE is here,” and the car door opens. That’s Rachel going out of the car and confronting ICE. That was the reality. You’re just driving, and then all of a sudden you’re in the middle of a war zone.

MUELLER: I mean, it was almost every day that I would encounter them, whether I was filming or not. You would see them on the street. They were everywhere.

Was there anything you discovered in the making of it that surprised you?

MUELLER: Having lived there, I would say it wasn’t so much making the film that was the shocking part. It was just existing in that city, it felt like every day a new horror was kind of revealed. I remember when there was a memo that was leaked that said that ICE agents could break down doors without a judicial warrant. I’m not actually sure if they did or not. But that information was disseminated really rapidly. To live in city where this could happen, where ICE could just knock down my door, and they were given permission to do that. That felt shocking.

For me, one of the most shocking things was the data visualization screens which show ICE activity everywhere across the country. That was the first time I’ve seen the scale represented that way.

POITRAS: We were really interested in, how do we represent the scale? There were two [visualizations]. The first one is the ICE flights, and that is crowdsourced data that was being collected by people on the ground. It’s not like the government was telling the public how many flights were taking off. It was somebody actually going to the airport — Nick Benson is his name — and writing down how many shackled prisoners were being boarded onto these planes at Minneapolis International Airport, which is the same airport that the public uses to go on vacation.

We had his database, which was more of a spreadsheet, and then we had another database from Human Rights First, and then worked with Josh Begley, who’s a data visualization [artist], and he then created, this graph that actually just shows a tiny slice of time. If we were to show the whole thing, you’d be watching for hours, or for three months or something. But we wanted to communicate the sense of scale, and that sort of shock of it. It was really important, to juxtapose the intimacy of the [victim’s] experience with the scale of it.

What impact do you hope this documentary has?

MUELLER: There’s two things that this film is holding at the same time. There is the optimism and hope that resistance can be effective and that the people have power and are able to take care of one another. And there is what the federal government is doing. Giving this visceral sense of what a paramilitary occupation of a U.S. city looks like. So I hope for both impacts, that we activate people into a sense of awareness that they might not have had, because the news media captures things in a very different capacity, and also a sense of optimism that this can be used, that other communities can look at this, be inspired, and use it as a tool.

POITRAS: We’re interested in the process and the sort of blueprint of it, and then also how to denormalize the violence. Simply that, like, we should not be living in this world; this should not be happening. Hopefully that gets communicated through the cinema and the use of that kind of translating of a reality [to the] screen.

Going back to what you said at the beginning about what the news media wasn’t capturing — what do you think is missing in the way traditional news media frames this story?

POITRAS: I think we’re often failed by the news media over and over and over again. I mean, I can go back — I made a film about the war in Iraq that we were walked into [2006’s My Country My Country]. The news media cheerlead for that war. We were walked into it. I think repeating images of violence endlessly — I don’t think that that is adding to anyone’s understanding.

There are great journalists doing great investigative reporting, and that lives alongside this kind of news cycle that just repeats endless reels of violence that I don’t think adds depth or context. I feel like the news cycle is reactionary. It’s responding in a way that lacks depth and time and nuance.

You guys approach this in a very different way, and you show things that haven’t been seen. But the facts of what was happening on the ground are well known and well documented. The resistance stopped the full occupation of Minneapolis, but ICE is still there and they’re occupying other cities now. How optimistic you are that recording the truth, showing the truth, presenting it in a dramatic way that evokes emotion, can have a real-world impact that convinces people to take action?

POITRAS: I hear you and all of that, but I still believe in it. There’s a difference between knowing something and actually understanding it on an emotional level. I’m thinking about the film I did about Nan Goldin [All the Beauty and the Bloodshed] and what she was able to do with her direct action organization, PAIN. The fact that the Sacklers were selling OxyContin and making billions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people was not news, but they made it so that this family was going to be shamed and drummed out of museums, etc. And that is a victory, and yet still there’s an overdose crisis. So I feel similarly about this film. We want to show the community coming together and just resisting. Because I think, what’s the alternative? The alternative is just to let it happen. To me, that’s not an alternative.