On 11 August 2023, police officers executed a search warrant on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned paper in central Kansas. Local law enforcement seized the computers, cell phones and reporting materials from all staff, as well as from the homes of one city council member and paper co-owner Eric Meyer, without incident – though they 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 Meyers warns the officers, as seen in a new documentary on the episode. “You’re going to be on national news tonight.”

He was not wrong. Though the raid could seem small potatoes, Marion being a rural town of around 1,900 about 60 miles north of Wichita, it soon became international news – a symbol of press freedom under attack in a country whose president routinely declares media to be “the enemy of the people”. In national press, the story was quick, troubling and tragic, especially after it was revealed that Joan, “stressed beyond her limits” by the raid, died of a heart attack the next day. In Marion, however, the story was, as small town things tend to go, much more complex, idiosyncratic and gossipy, personal histories and resentments refracted under the spotlight.

Seized, directed by Sharon Liese, manages the difficult task of bridging the two perspectives without jarring the viewer, allowing local characters to complicate the story without ever losing sight of its import. Filmed in and around Marion beginning a year after the incident, this clear-eyed doc mercifully rejects the impulse, so common in large outlets such as this one, to flatten a local saga into a tidy and politically expedient narrative (and I say that as a former small-town reporter firmly on the side of local news).

The subjects, as presented in a brisk 94 minutes, are as colorful as any movie character, allowed room to demonstrate the contradictions that serve, as one resident puts it, as a “microcosm of America”. Liese is sharp-eyed on where political ideologies warp under close inspection and personal stakes. Some residents respect the paper’s willingness to criticize town leaders; some wish it would stop printing embarrassing police records of every single arrest. Some think Meyer, a proud and stubborn man, is 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.

Fascinating vox pop surveys aside, Seized offers the most thorough explanation yet of what led to the raid, which is equal parts sinister and amusingly petty. In short, and I will be simplifying because it is confusing and worth watching unfold in all its dishy glory: the paper, tipped off by a restaurateur’s ex-best friend that she was driving without a license, was accused of identity theft by said woman, who was also allegedly involved with the police chief, who initiated the raid. The former mayor is involved. A judge, somehow, signed off on it. It’s quintessentially, almost endearingly small-town stuff, but Liese, recruiting several Kansas metro reporters as talking heads, makes clear that none of this should ever have merited a search warrant.

In the current timeline, Meyer’s paper strives to keep on keeping on with but one veteran reporter (Phyllis Zorn, a delectably tart old-timer), an office manager (Cheri Bentz, who I wish I got to know more) 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 both into the idiosyncracies 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 — make for some of the film’s most enjoyable scenes, as do tributes to the hilariously feisty Joan, a longtime steward of the town’s memory.

At times, I wanted the film to dig in a bit deeper, especially as it sets up understandable, nuanced tension between Meyer, a stalwart who views journalism as a “calling” worthy of crappy pay and negative reactions, and Hartnett, a social media native more wary of backlash and concerned with the paper’s local reputation; it does not play well when Meyer receives national awards for press freedom, while also seeking an example-setting $10m— far more than insurance coverage — in civil suits against the county.

But also, who can blame him, when press freedom remains so gallingly tenuous in the US; 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, a bit frustratingly, outside the film’s scope. You can probably guess who voted for who, but there is no mention of the attention black hole in charge.

Though I remain fascinated in how idiosyncratic personal politics translate upwards, that 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 seeking distribution