They're Here - Short Film Screening

The Cedar Cultural Center is screening They're Here on Wednesday, November 4, a 25-minute documentary by Academy Award and Golden Lion winner Laura Poitras and Minneapolis-based filmmaker and journalist Rachel Lauren Mueller. The film is followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

They're Here documents Operation Metro Surge, the three-month ICE occupation of Minneapolis. It follows Edén Villa—a pseudonym—and other anonymous residents as they evade and resist: masked agents abducting children, people traveling in trunks through a winter landscape. The film pulls together dash-cam footage, crowdsourced data visualizations, counter-surveillance, and original on-the-ground material, all anchored by Villa's testimony, to build a non-fiction portrait of resistance.

Poitras and Mueller aimed for a distinct visual signature, citing Children of Men and The Nickel Boys as signposts, with the goal of denormalizing the violence unfolding on the streets. The project follows Poitras's previous portraiture of dissidents like Nan Goldin in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Edward Snowden in Citizenfour, and it draws on Minneapolis's own history of activism, from the American Indian Movement of the 1960s to the neighborhood watch groups that formed during the 2020 George Floyd uprising.

Doors open at 7 PM, the film starts at 7:30 PM, and the Q&A follows at 8 PM. Tickets are $12.75.