Within a beautifully structured series of artful, dramatic vignettes and provocative, and often haunting, interviews, Errol Morris confronts head-on the frightening and brutal chapter in American history when the Trump administration oversaw (as one interviewee puts it) “state-created orphans” as it set in place a family separation policy that saw illegal migrant families left traumatised as children were forcibly removed from their parents.
Screening Out of Competition at Venice, Separated merges explosive and often chilling interviews involving whistleblowing officials with elegantly and movingly shot footage of a migrant mother and son (played by Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando Lara Lagunes) as they try to find hope and freedom by illegally entering the United States.
Based on NBC Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, Morris very explicitly aims to reveal that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. A policy that still sees hundreds of families separated years later, balanced by a seeming reluctance by the Democratic administration to pass laws to ensure it can never happen again and haunted by Trump still saying that is a policy he might reintroduce should be regain political control.
At the core of the film is testimony from career social worker Captain Jonathan White, who worked at the Office of Refugee Resettlement and who decided to jeopardise his career by reaching out with a story that he passionately felt needed to be told. Other Interviews include Elaine Duke, former acting head of the Department of Homeland Security; Jallyn Sualog, a bureaucrat in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and Scott Lloyd, former Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
As White says: “It is a thankless job – if you are not motivated to help the children then there are few other rewards. The key word is ‘child’ – they are children and often in unimaginable danger…those children require protection and care to find a family member in the US who can take care of them.”
He explains that most of the migrants are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where children often approached at a young age to join local gangs, hence why families make the trek to the US.
“The Unaccompanied Children policy was about accompanied children without their families,” he says. “The Unaccompanied Children programme was essentially hijacked for a purpose for which it was never intended, nor authorised in law and used as a tool to take children from their parents.” The scheme saw children – sometimes even babies – taken from parents and held in secure institutions. Eventually media exposed the scheme, and a judge insisted children be returned to parents, but it was still thought by the Trump administration that it would act a deterrent for others aiming to make their way illegally into the US.
As Errol Morris says in his director statement: “I have wrestled my entire life with the question of how to depict the world, how to preserve the deep ambiguities in how we try to apprehend it. Separated is my most recent attempt. How do we capture the horrors of US border policies without repeating things we have already seen, perhaps ad nauseam? How do we capture the underlying emotional reality of what is going on? The tragedy of parents separated from their children, powerless to do anything. Or of the children, incapable of comprehending their nightmarish new lives.”
For the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s White, there has been a gradual development of cruelty towards immigration in the US. He adds: “Here was an administration that wanted to do it and there were no laws to stop them…the other architect is Congress which has failed and not passed a law to stop an administration who wants to do it.” For him the scheme was “extraordinary in its cruelty” and adds he still has worries it could all happen again.
Errol Morris delivers a powerful and moving film. As an interviewer he often keeps his own voice in the film, filling in blanks and pushing interviewees when necessary. While in itself striking, the talking head material is given further urgency and energy thanks to astute use of archival footage and the ‘performances’ by Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando Lara Lagunes which would not have been out of place in an explosive feature drama. It is a film that haunts and hopefully one that helps keep pressure on future administrations to determine that such basic cruelty can never again.
USA-Mexico, 2024, 93mins
Dir: Errol Morris
Production: Fourth Floor, Moxie Pictures, NBC News Studios, Participant
Producers: Errol Morris, Robert Fernandez, Molly O’Brien, Steven Hathaway
Sales: Submarine
Cinematography: Igor Martinović
Editor: Steven Hathaway
Music: Paul Leonard-Morgan
With: Gabriela Cartol, Diego Armando Lara Lagunes, Jonathan White, Allyn Sualog, Jacob Soboroff, Scott Lloyd, Elaine Duke, Lee Gelernt
