(The New York Film Festival (NYFF) runs September 25 through October 12 and HtN has tons of reviews coming your way like Matt Delman’s They’re Here movie review.)
Laura Poitras is back with a 25 minute documentary, partnering with co-director Rachel Lauren Mueller who lives in the city of Minneapolis a mere six blocks from where Renée Good was gunned down by I.C.E. Her camera rolls in the wake of Good’s killing, along with nurse Alex Pretti, their photos hanging from banners honoring their bravery. The cause is not unlike Star Wars: a ragtag rebellion forms in response to the imperial occupation, though former Commander Greg Bovino is a little short to be a stormtrooper. Locals communicate over a walkie-talkie radio system, use sophisticated software and even blow whistles to alert unsuspecting citizens to I.C.E. presence. The result is a chilling document of a place that feels out of another time, a chapter from a dystopian novel.
We open on a long take in the car of a woman being harassed by an I.C.E. vehicle parked outside her home. She chases them around before they circle back to her house and point at it threateningly, but she yells back at them, unafraid. Later we’ll see how prevalent these stakeouts are. We lie inside the trunk of a car and listen to a latinx man explain the fear that drove him out of town. Other scenes are aimed at a computer screen, where the off-camera speaker explains that each yellow pin is an abduction or attempted abduction. When the cursor zooms out, the magnitude of yellow pins is staggering. On a long lens from an airport gate, we watch those who were captured being loaded onto planes in handcuffs. Then flight tracking software shows where the planes are sending them.
Billed as a horror film, They’re Here is a menacing title, echoing the shouts of terrified neighbors across the Minneapolis suburbs. The alarms work, to a degree, and most of the cellphone footage depicts the I.C.E. agents unsuccessful, despite their pepper-spraying of any citizen who gets in their way. Mueller’s footage is visceral, recalling scenes from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Poitras’ contributions are clearly visible, if you experienced her 2016 Whitney Museum exhibition ‘Astro Noise’ about mass surveillance, drones and military occupation. Her fingerprints, along with editor Adriana Pacheco, are all over this film. The tone has a calm uneasiness before exploding with bursts of violence.
As we now know, the majority of I.C.E. forces have been drawn down in Minneapolis, likely in response to the public outcry. The film’s runtime mirrors the relatively brief (3-month) occupation of one of our most diverse midwest cities. Hopefully the release of this film will help prevent something like this from happening again, and in the future will be looked upon as an artifact. Poitras has always had a knack for combining journalism and art, and by empowering her co-director Rachel Lauren Mueller to make and release this film, she is strengthening the ranks of those who oppose fascism. These masked assailants may still be here today, but the film proves if we all work together, they could be gone tomorrow.
– Matthew Delman (@ItsTheRealDel)
