Seized Review: Captivating Documentary Goes Inside a Shocking Newspaper Raid
Sundance Film Festival: The story of the Marion County Record and the forces that tried to destroy it is expanded for a charming, and concerning, look at freedom of the press in America.
The Raid That Shook a Small Town
On 11 August 2023, police officers executed a search warrant on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned newspaper in central Kansas. Local law enforcement seized computers, cell phones, and reporting materials from all staff members, as well as from the homes of one city council member and paper co-owner Eric Meyer. The operation proceeded without incident, though officers met the impassioned resistance of Meyer's 98-year-old mother Joan, the paper's other co-owner, who threw her walker to the ground and declared the raid "Nazi stuff".
"This is illegal," Eric Meyer warned the officers, as captured in the new documentary. "You're going to be on national news tonight." He was not mistaken. Though the raid could seem insignificant given Marion's status as a rural town of around 1,900 people approximately 60 miles north of Wichita, it soon became international news. The incident transformed into a powerful symbol of press freedom under attack in a country whose former president routinely declared media to be "the enemy of the people".
National Tragedy and Local Complexity
In national press coverage, the story was quick, troubling, and ultimately tragic. It was revealed that Joan Meyer, "stressed beyond her limits" by the raid, died of a heart attack the following day. In Marion itself, however, the narrative proved far more complex, idiosyncratic, and gossipy, with personal histories and long-standing resentments refracted under the intense spotlight.
Seized, directed by Sharon Liese, manages the difficult task of bridging these two perspectives without jarring the viewer. The documentary allows local characters to complicate the story while never losing sight of its broader significance. Filmed in and around Marion beginning a year after the incident, this clear-eyed documentary mercifully rejects the impulse, so common in large media outlets, to flatten a local saga into a tidy and politically expedient narrative.
Colorful Characters and Contradictions
The subjects, as presented in a brisk 94 minutes, are as colorful as any movie characters, given room to demonstrate the contradictions that serve, as one resident puts it, as a "microcosm of America". Liese proves sharp-eyed in revealing where political ideologies warp under close inspection and personal stakes. Some residents respect the paper's willingness to criticize town leaders; others wish it would stop printing embarrassing police records of every single arrest. Some view Meyer, a proud and stubborn man, as a bully. A majority seem mostly upset that he cited children's letters to Santa, an annual newspaper tradition, as evidence of the education gap post-Covid.
The Petty and Sinister Origins of the Raid
Beyond fascinating vox pop surveys, Seized offers the most thorough explanation yet of what led to the raid, which proves equal parts sinister and amusingly petty. In simplified terms, the paper was tipped off by a restaurateur's ex-best friend that she was driving without a license. The woman then accused the paper of identity theft, and she was allegedly involved with the police chief who initiated the raid. The former mayor became involved, and a judge somehow signed off on the warrant. While quintessentially small-town in its drama, Liese, recruiting several Kansas metro reporters as talking heads, makes clear that none of this should ever have merited a search warrant.
Keeping the Press Alive Against the Odds
In the current timeline, Meyer's paper strives to continue operating with just one veteran reporter, Phyllis Zorn, an office manager named Cheri Bentz, and a cub reporter, Finn Hartnett, loaned from New York. Hartnett, a soft-spoken and endearingly affectless twenty-something openly desperate for any job, serves as the outsider's view into both the idiosyncrasies of Marion County and the work of hyper-local reporting in 2025, with scant resources and formidable politics. His crash course in old-school newspaper work—how to use a landline, why to make calls—makes for some of the film's most enjoyable scenes, as do tributes to the hilariously feisty Joan Meyer, a longtime steward of the town's memory.
Nuanced Tensions and Broader Implications
At times, viewers might wish the film would dig a bit deeper, especially as it sets up understandable, nuanced tension between Meyer, a stalwart who views journalism as a "calling" worthy of poor pay and negative reactions, and Hartnett, a social media native more wary of backlash and concerned with the paper's local reputation. This tension does not play well when Meyer receives national awards for press freedom while also seeking an example-setting $10 million in civil suits against the county—far more than insurance coverage.
Yet who can blame him when press freedom remains so gallingly tenuous in the United States? Just days before the film's Sundance premiere, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter, owned by billionaire Trump ally Jeff Bezos. Those names remain, somewhat frustratingly, outside the film's scope. While viewers can probably guess political affiliations, there is no direct mention of the attention black hole in charge.
A Defense of the Press Through Specificity
Though fascination remains regarding how idiosyncratic personal politics translate upwards, this omission is probably for the best. Seized is, ultimately, a defense of the press through precise specificity on the smallest scale. "This is not a particularly corrupt town," Hartnett notes on his final day of work. "I think that, to an extent, people just aren't used to having a local newspaper these days." How sad, and how commendable, then, that the Marion County Record soldiers on. Seized is screening at the Sundance Film Festival and is actively seeking distribution.
