Seized

Seized, 2026, 4 ¼ stars

All the Kansas men

Image is courtesy of the Florida Film Festival.

Exclusive to MeierMovies, April 2026

What do you get when you cross Barbara Kopple, Errol Morris and Adam McKay with All the President’s Men? Answer: the grand jury winner for best feature documentary at the recent Florida Film Festival and arguably the best doc of 2026 so far.

If all those seemingly disparate ingredients leave you feeling like you’ve been struck by a cinematic cyclone, rest assured that you are in Kansas.

Specifically, you’re in Marion, Kansas, population 1,922. The person who has brought you here is director Sharon Liese. And the film is Seized.

Marion is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it burg 60 miles out of Wichita. But for a moment in 2023, the town made international ink after local police illegally raided its newspaper, The Marion County Record. The reasons for the raid are both farcical and fascist, and Liese does a masterful job of objectively covering all sides of the story with humor, style and accuracy.

At the center of the film is The Record’s publisher and editor, Eric Meyer, whose own house was searched during the raid. The trauma put Meyer’s mother, the 98-year-old co-owner of the publication, in her grave the following day. (“She was a martyr for the press,” Meyer says.)

Astonishingly, almost everything was caught on surveillance video, which Liese uses extensively in her film. But she also expertly incorporates interviews with almost everyone involved in the raid and its aftermath, plus plenty of townsfolk. And in a nice narrative touch, she bookends the movie with the arrival and departure of a young, naïve reporter new to The Record, allowing us to see the story through the eyes of an outsider.

It’s difficult to believe this could have happened in America. But it’s especially tough to take when it’s your own state. You see, like the staff of The Record, I’m also a journalist from Kansas. There’s no place like home.

Interview

Prior to the movie’s screening at the 2026 Florida Film Festival, I interviewed director Sharon Liese.

“There was a police raid … on the Marion County Record and on two homes in Marion,” Liese told me. “And one was of the editor who lived with the, the co-owner of the newspaper, his mom, a 98-year-old woman, and she died … right after the police raid. …

Director Sharon Liese accepts, via Zoom, on the Enzian big screen, the grand jury award for best feature documentary for her film, Seized.

“So I followed the aftermath of this town, like, kind of coping with and processing this police raid that has since been disavowed. … But it’s like an Adam McKay-esque sort of story that unfolds with all of these, all of these characters who are just so enigmatic, and interesting and colorful. And it’s about local journalism. … It’s about the violation of the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. …

“I hope that people see … that there can be a really informative documentary that’s also wildly entertaining. And so you can get the broccoli and then the important stuff about journalism and the Constitution, but you can also really enjoy meeting people that you may never have met, the kind of people that you maybe never have met before.

“So that’s one takeaway. And the other takeaways have to do with that there are blind spots that we all have. And when you when you watch the film, you see how people might believe in the First Amendment, and every person will tell you that. But when feelings about people get in the way, we have blind spots, and sometimes the things we think we value get sort of tainted. …

“And even especially law enforcement: They don’t understand. In the film, you will see that there are some law-enforcement personnel who just really don’t comprehend the Constitution. And they also believe that if they’re they got orders from somebody else to carry out something, that’s all they need. …

“People mostly come [to see the movie] because they want to hear about this egregious attack on a newspaper, and press freedoms are such a huge thing right now. But then … they see something unexpected in it, which I really like.”