{"id":618378,"date":"2026-10-02T11:06:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T11:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/618378\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T11:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T11:06:10","slug":"the-ice-documentary-as-chilling-as-a-horror-movie-were-trying-to-put-the-audience-in-a-position-of-terror-new-york-film-festival-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/618378\/","title":{"rendered":"The ICE documentary as chilling as a horror movie: \u2018We\u2019re trying to put the audience in a position of terror\u2019 | New York film festival 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get Out<\/a>. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre<\/a>. The Purge<\/a>. All three films build on an august tradition of using horror as a Trojan horse to comment on the social, political and racial anxieties of their day. They\u2019re Here, a new documentary featured in this year\u2019s New York film festival<\/a>, flips the script. Directed by Rachel Lauren Mueller<\/a>, a journalist, and Laura Poitras<\/a>, Academy award-winner, the 24-minute film employs horror tropes to re-examine the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE<\/a>) offiers in Minneapolis last winter. \u201cFor filmmakers and journalists, there\u2019s a great sense of responsibility in these moments when they arise,\u201d said Mueller, a Minneapolis resident. \u201cThis is my neighborhood. It was my community. It was very clear to me what my role in this moment would be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Framed as a dystopian story set in an urban tundra, They\u2019re Here follows the Trump administration\u2019s border control campaign in Minnesota \u2013 officially dubbed Operation Metro Surge<\/a>. Over the course of three winter months, the Department of Homeland Security moved to remove the Twin Cities\u2019 Somali immigrant population and destabilize its progressive political order. The documentary takes in the wanton shock-and-awe campaign and scales it down to the battlefield, following Minneapolis residents as they evade and resist ICE and customs and border patrol agents \u2013 obscuring the residents\u2019 identities for protection.<\/p>\n

It opens on an overcast, -10F (-23C) day with one woman who goes by the pseudonym \u201cLiz Lemon\u201d on a conference call with other vigilant members of her community as she follows an ICE detail patrolling her neighborhood. When the agents make as if to leave, only to lead her back to her own front door and point at it, she fumes: \u201cAre you pointing to my house like I don\u2019t know where I live? Fuck off!\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-director Laura Poitras Photograph: Jan Stu\u0308rmann<\/p>\n

They\u2019re Here\u2019s tapestry of dashcam video, counter-surveillance and crowdsourced footage from the ground puts viewers in the thick of the anxious moment. The directors say their film and its tone were inspired by a 10-second Instagram post<\/a> of a winter\u2019s drive through the woods, overlaid with a soundtrack that rivaled Prince in its resonance across the Twin Cities \u2013 replete with honking horns, whistles and cries to \u201cclose your doors\u201d as balaclava-shrouded ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents crash into their daily routines. The film\u2019s title borrows from another citizen callout \u2013 the most resigned of them all, perhaps. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019re trying to do with this film is put the audience in a position of terror and fear,\u201d said Poitras.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re Here doesn\u2019t just chronicle the disruptions to quotidian life \u2013 an apartment view of a quiet intersection suddenly turned into a chaotic backdrop by federal agents in gas masks firing smoke bombs to clear the streets after the killing of Alex Pretti<\/a> by federal agents. It pushes in on the violence: one agent rag-dolling a female protester to the icy pavement, others pepper-spraying citizens right in the eyes. It captures Greg Bovino<\/a>, the notable federal law enforcement officer in this hellish tableau whose face wasn\u2019t obscured, charging into a crowd of protesters and backing down one guy shielding himself with his bike. \u201cYou hit me with that bike, you\u2019re done,\u201d the former ICE majordomo snarls.<\/p>\n

Co-director Rachel Lauren Mueller Photograph: Ryan Stopera<\/p>\n

Even more stunning than the scene is the source of that footage: a pair of Chicago teenagers who had been tracking the national ICE crackdown independently. \u201cI didn\u2019t know them at the time, but we were all at that moment together,\u201d said Mueller, reflecting on a filmmaking responsibility that morphed from a journalistic call of duty to a personal shield. \u201cThere was a moment when I\u2019m out of the car and there was an ICE agent threatening to smash this person\u2019s window, and he\u2019s screaming. I\u2019m maybe 6ft away and my camera, a DSLR, is not small. But the [agent] turned, saw the camera and took a step back \u2013 like he was really startled by how big it was. There was a physical barrier with this particular camera, but ICE agents were seeing it in a different light than the rest of the documentation that was happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as powerful are the scenes from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport \u2013 of detainees in the frigid cold, wearing little more than shackles and a prison jumpsuit, being herded onto noncommercial airliners before being secreted off to any number of federal detention centers across the country or deported away entirely \u2013 as visuals by professional plane watcher Nick Benson<\/a> and data journalist Josh Begley makes clear. It all unfolds with the understanding that travelers rushing to catch their connecting flights \u2013 who aren\u2019t shown \u2013 have scant awareness of the horror they\u2019re passing through.<\/p>\n

Still from They\u2019re Here. Photograph: Courtesy of Tim Evans<\/p>\n

But the heart of the film is Ed\u00e9n Villa, a pseudonymed Latin American immigrant who is seen (but never pictured) and heard as he\u2019s being smuggled to work in the trunk of a car. It\u2019s a risk, sure \u2013 but, as he implies, any extended home hideout would depend on a steady job to maintain cover. It\u2019s the kind of personal testimony that breaks Operation Metro Surge out of the news cycle into the realm of art as a historical artifact. \u201cIt just grows out of this long-standing belief I\u2019ve had that cinema can help understand moments we\u2019re living in \u2013 particularly political moments or moments of crisis, moments of violence, moments of extreme state abuse of power,\u201d said Poitras, who has returned to these themes often in her films on fellow chroniclers Edward Snowden<\/a>, Julian Assange<\/a> and the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh<\/a>. \u201cWe have these tools that can get at truth in different types of ways that are emotional.\u201d<\/p>\n

And even though DHS\u2019 recent change in tactics, from shock-and-awe to blending into the background and lying in wait<\/a>, would seem to suggest that the federal government\u2019s offensive has only evolved, the fact that it was even forced to turn down the temperature gives this horror story satisfying heroes: Minnesota residents who were clearly underestimated as hapless victims. \u201cThere\u2019s a history of resistance here that goes back decades,\u201d Mueller said. \u201cEarly labor movements started here. The American Indian movement started in the Twin Cities. The resistance that happened in Minneapolis would not have been possible if the networks weren\u2019t in place after the uprising after George Floyd<\/a>\u2019s murder. And that uprising wouldn\u2019t have happened if Philando Castile<\/a> hadn\u2019t been killed. Each one of these pieces builds upon itself.\u201d<\/p>\n