Sundance ‘26: ‘SEIZED’ Is a Chilling Case Study in the Erosion of Press Freedom

On August 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, a town where “everyone knows everyone” isn’t just a saying, it’s civic policy, raided the offices of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, phones, and personal devices, even searched the homes of the paper’s staff. A day later, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer died. Her doctor cited stress from the raid as a contributing factor. So begins Seized, Sharon Liese’s clear-eyed examination of tensions between local government and its hardnosed media outlet boiling over, and in the process, becoming overnight national news.

Liese leans into the absurdity and outrage already baked into the story. What starts as a seemingly isolated clash between a scrappy local newspaper and an aggrieved police chief snowballs into a national case study in power run amok. In Marion, law enforcement doesn’t just overstep, it outright dismisses law and order. The city’s leadership, from the police chief to certain council members, comes off less like public servants and more like petty authoritarians with a grudge and the power to do whatever the hell they want. Even the mayor, though not the primary instigator, seems more interested in preserving his local fiefdom and maintaining good PR than defending constitutional rights.

What Seized does especially well is scale. It roots you in the granular details of Marion — city council meetings, interpersonal grudges, and the deep weirdness of small-town power dynamics — then quietly zooms out to reveal a much larger truth. This isn’t just about Marion. It’s about the convenient suspension of the First Amendment when it gets in the way of local power brokers in a post-Trump era. It is about the normalization of overreach, and how law enforcement, when enabled, can weaponize the legal system against anyone who dares to scrutinize them.

The characters — including hard-nosed, antagonistic editor and publisher Eric Meyer, his detail-oriented, record-keeping mother Joan Meyer, openly corrupt Police Chief Gideon Cody, and recent college grad and Gen Z reporter Finn Harnett — are all vividly captured, which helps bring humanity to this story. You root for the plight of the Record’s staff; they remain principled and dogged, unwilling to surrender their journalistic freedom and integrity. And you root just as hard against the cops, the mayor, and the council members, who treat the law like something that applies to everyone but them. Liese doesn’t flatten anyone into caricature, but make no mistake, this is a film with villains. It is just smart enough to let them incriminate themselves.

Seized builds its case with the calm precision of a well-researched investigative report; patient, factual, and observant. Like the newspaper at its center, it trusts its audience. It lays out the facts with care and clarity, crafting a story that hits harder because of what it means at scale, as well as for how it functions as a microcosm of a much larger attack on the democratic institution of a free press.

CONCLUSION: Sharon Liese’s ‘Seized’ captures the breakdown of free press in a rural Kansas town, when a personally-motivated police chief decides to interrupt their operations. A poignant examination of how the First Amendment can be trampled – and how to fight back.