Unlike Cannes, the Venice Film Festival has a reputation for putting a big spotlight on boundary-pushing documentaries. Back in 2022, one of these even took home the showcase’s top prize, the Golden Lion: Laura Poitras’s , a portrait of pioneering photographer Nan Goldin and her fight against the Sackler family, the clan at the centre of the US’s opioid crisis. Last year, the Oscar-winning documentarian (she won a statuette back in 2015 for the Edward Snowden-centric ) returned to the Lido with , a deep dive into the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Now she’s back with another urgent must-see: a 22-minute short film titled , which she has co-directed with Rachel Lauren Mueller – a harrowing snapshot of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s three-month occupation of Minneapolis at the start of this year.
Better known as ICE, the organisation has been responsible for the arrest and deportation of thousands of immigrants over the past year, with a particular focus on the Minnesotan city, where residents including Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti have lost their lives in their attempts to resist their actions. isn’t a talking heads-led introduction to this crisis – it’s a fully immersive horror movie which places you right at the centre of this mind-bending dystopia.
Its first few minutes are low-key but unforgettable: we see the dash cam footage of an activist trailing ICE vehicles across a snow-covered Minneapolis. She’s speaking to friends involved in the same mission – to track the organisation’s operations in the city – and then we see her following a car as it pulls up on her own doorstep. A gloved hand emerges from the front passenger seat and points to her house. Then a masked figure, all in black, pops out of the window, looks directly at her and keeps pointing. The effect is both bone-chilling and masterfully economical.
continues in this spirit: we cut back and forth to the voice of a Mexican man hiding out from ICE, who speaks in his native Spanish. (An important choice given that many of the other anonymous people we hear in this documentary speak English and, from covert shots, appear to be white.) We see ICE agents in balaclavas tackling bleeding protesters to the ground and seemingly confiscating American passports. We witness shackled detainees being loaded onto planes from the freezing cold tarmac, and the zipping trajectories of their flight paths across North America. There are sequences which resemble something you might expect to see in a war zone – armoured cars, armed men, journalists in gas masks fleeing the scene. One section of the film, composed only of a map of ICE’s abductions is terrifying, zooming in to show individual reports of children being dragged out of smashed car windows, and then out, to show the astonishing scale of the organisation’s activities.
There are viewers who might be alienated by Poitras and Mueller’s spare, hands-off approach – instead of spoon-feeding their audience, little is signposted and our close attention is demanded throughout as we move from moment to moment, trying to piece together the full picture. But I, for one, found this remarkably effective. Beyond an eerie, quietly rumbling score, which ratchets up the tension to unbearable levels, there’s little embellishment. This is simply the reality on the ground, the film appears to say – it doesn’t need to be sensationalised.
Startlingly, for a movie which drives head-first into the abyss, ends on a hopeful note – a tribute to the unbelievable resilience of a community in which tens of thousands have volunteered to document ICE’s activities. It was this collective resistance, the constant, relentless disruption of the organisation’s efforts, which led to 80 per cent of troops being removed from Minneapolis back in March. Nationally, the goal remains to deport a million people a year, but it’s clear that the actions of ordinary citizens can move the needle significantly.
There is, of course, a limit to what this film can do and how much of the situation it’s able to capture in its brief run time, but what it does achieve is incredibly impressive. This story still isn’t over, and it urges those who have looked away from it to remember the importance of bearing witness. This is the power of a great documentary – to transform a headline into a visceral experience which we can’t escape, forcing us to confront injustice and take action. isn’t a film you’ll easily forget.