Courtesy MSNBC
New docu-drama Separated reveals the shocking realities of families separated at the US-Mexico border. Here, documentarian Errol Morris (The Pigeon Tunnel) looks at the Trump administration’s heinous practice of seizing children from their parents for the misdemeanor crime of crossing the border. Morris weaves chilling interviews with government officials and whistleblowers’ revelations of bureaucratic skullduggery, and vivid reenactments of migrant families’ moment-to-moment survival concerns prove harrowing at every turn.
Morris further fleshes out the goings-on through reenactments featuring actors Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando as a mother and son. These are as artfully realistic as possible in illustrating how migrants endure the dangerous journey to the border in pursuit of a better life and provide more than an eat-your-vegetables exposé of official wrongdoing. In fact, Morris’s breathtaking cinematography carefully connects viewers with the humanity of desperate travelers, creating a disturbing picture of state-sponsored cruelty.
Separated is a poignant adaptation of the book by journalist Jacob Soboroff. The film highlights classified information indicating the US Border Patrol’s “zero tolerance” scheme of jailing children and infants as young as one as early as 2017. However, administration officials denied the policy existed until a New York Times investigation confirmed it in 2018. Public backlash and a California court order pressured the Trump administration to end the practice and reunite migrant families within 30 days, though the justifications of those responsible for the policy ring hollow against the revelation that six years after the program ended, more than 1,300 orphaned children remain in custody with little hope of ever reuniting with their families.
Morris’s important documentary exposes the chain of uncaring government officials and their tactics of child arrests. The creation of institutionalized orphan children as a deterrent to illegal entry into the US might even be the darkest chapter in recent American history. The list of the guilty goes all the way to the top of the Trump administration and the film is replete with lurking (and some not-so-hidden) evildoers.
8
+Cinematography; The story
-Failure to translate the real danger
Separated
Directed by Morris
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 93 min.
