(L-R) Eric Meyer, Finn Hartnett, Sharon Liese and Jessica McMaster attend the “Seized” Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

By Adam Silverstein

The mood inside the Ray Theatre is lighter than you might expect, given what’s about to unfold. Director Sharon Liese steps onstage smiling and thanks the audience for being there. “It’s such a privilege to premiere a film in front of a Festival audience like this,” she says. Her short film Parker — about a family of Black Americans who choose their own last name — premiered at the Festival in 2023, but her new documentary Seized takes on an entirely different subject.

Set in Marion, Kansas, the film — in the running for U.S. Documentary Competition — tells the story of the Marion County Record, a small-town newspaper suddenly thrust into the national spotlight after a police raid, and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer, shortly afterward. The facts alone are shocking. Liese’s achievement is how watchable she makes the story feel, without sanding down its sharper edges.

At the center is editor Eric Meyer, a relentless, often unpopular presence in town. He runs the paper with a kind of stubborn moral clarity that doesn’t always win him friends. If there’s a DUI, it’s in the paper. If someone’s kid can’t spell, he’ll note it in an editorial. In a town where everybody knows everybody, that kind of scrutiny doesn’t play well. The film never pretends Meyer is universally beloved — and that honesty gives Seized its credibility.

Liese patiently lays out the tangled factors that lead to the raid: local politics, law enforcement, bruised egos, and a twisted crime-adjacent saga involving a powerful visiting politician and a deeply compromised police chief. It’s the kind of story that sounds too absurd to be real until you watch it unfold beat by beat.

What’s surprising is how often the audience laughs. Seized has a sharp sense of humor, especially when it leans into the peculiar rhythms of small-town life — the gossip, the grudges, the passive-aggressive politeness. There’s even a kind of workplace comedy energy when Finn Hartnett enters the picture: a young would-be journalist from New York City trying to make it, he ends up joining the paper just as chaos descends.

But the film never loses sight of its emotional core. Joan Meyer’s death hangs heavily over everything. Liese treats it with restraint, letting the implications speak for themselves.

During the Q&A, Liese explains how the project began. She heard about the story on NPR, drove two hours to Marion, and started talking to Eric Meyer. “We trusted each other,” she says. That trust becomes the backbone of the film. Meyer, for his part, is clear-eyed about his role. When he takes the mic, the theater erupts into a standing ovation. He waits it out, then says something quietly radical: he insisted on having no editorial control over the film. “She could portray me however she wanted,” he says. “Even if it was the devil incarnate. That’s journalism.”

Meyer goes on to warn that the biggest danger to small newspapers isn’t angry towns or corrupt officials — it’s corporate consolidation, companies buying up local papers and hollowing them out. When Finn Hartnett shares that he’s now an intern at The New Republic in New York, the room cheers. It feels like a small victory.

Seized asks difficult questions about power, accountability, and where journalism fits inside a community that doesn’t always want to be scrutinized. Who’s right? The paper or the town? Liese is smart enough to leave that question unresolved. The beauty of the film is that it trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort — and decide for themselves.