Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras has teamed up with Minneapolis-based journalist Rachel Lauren Mueller on a new short documentary, They're Here, which depicts how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents occupied Minneapolis and the anonymous residents who organised to resist them. The film, styled deliberately like a horror or sci-fi feature, uses dashcam footage, street-level filming and crowdsourced data to show masked ICE agents in unmarked cars operating in the city, aiming to capture the unsettling reality of the crackdown and prompt Americans to take action.

The pair began filming daily from January through March, drawing on neighbourhood surveillance and mutual aid networks that had grown out of groups formed after George Floyd's murder, with Mueller's local ties helping secure access to wary residents. Scenes include shackled detainees being led onto planes at Minneapolis airport and a family hiding in a car boot to evade agents. It marks Poitras's first project since All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and follows her 2015 Oscar win for Citizenfour; the film is screening in Venice's Out of Competition strand, with Submarine Entertainment Sales handling US sales.