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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘SEPARATED’ REVIEW: ERROL MORRIS DOC ABOUT THE TRUMP
ADMINISTRATION’S CHILD SEPARATION POLICY IS A FURIOUS CALL TO ACTION
 
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Christian Blauvelt
August 29, 2024
IndieWire
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_ Watching Errol Morris‘s urgent documentary on Family Separation
will raise your blood pressure considerably as it questions: How is it
that we forgot about this shocking inhumanity so quickly? _

New Errol Morris Documenary 'Separated', Wickipedia

 

The cruelty is the point.

We’ve heard that sentence a lot over the past eight years. At no
time was it ever more blisteringly accurate than during the
family-separation policy the Trump administration enacted within days
of taking office in January 2017. Watching Errol Morris
[[link removed]]‘s urgent reminder of a
documentary — possibly the most enraging film
[[link removed]] yet made by a director who’s
certainly known how to illuminate infuriating topics over the past 45
years
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will raise your blood pressure considerably. Especially on one point
that “Separated [[link removed]],”
produced by NBC News, implies, but never underlines: How is it that we
forgot about this shocking inhumanity so quickly?

How is it that — following the 2020 election at least — there
weren’t congressional hearings, the appointment of a special
prosecutor, and charges filed, related to the policy? It ostensibly
ended in the summer of 2018 after massive public outcry, but over
1,000 children remain in U.S. custody, still un-reunited with their
parents. That is an abandonment of governance almost as damning of the
Biden administration as of the Trump administration that actually
carried out the policy.

Morris recognizes an essential truth from the start: Much of the
American public, and certainly the U.S. government, seems to have
“moved on” from this injustice, turning their attention to the
parade of crises that have occurred since. It’s necessary then for a
total refresher. He starts “Separated,” based on NBC News reporter
Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name, from the very beginning: how
the policy came to be, who was steering it, and how it affected
thousands of children, ripped from their parents’ arms as the
families were caught illegally entering the U.S. at its southern
border. The idea was to deter the waves of migrants fleeing Guatemala,
Honduras, and El Salvador, countries consumed with gang violence: Come
to the U.S. illegally, and you may never see your children again. And
they may end up in cages.

 
Soboroff admits near the start of the film that he didn’t really
have a background in “source-based reporting” before writing his
2020 book — at least not the in-depth investigational kind he
ultimately delivered. He can still be seen hosting segments on the
“Today” show or anchoring “Weekend Today,” and it really is
remarkable how well he balances the “start your morning right!”
infotainment demands of those shows with the serious journalism of his
book (and ongoing segments from the border in the years leading up to
it). He’s a ready-made subject for Morris in his own right: Looking
like a kind of 21st-century Harold Lloyd, Soboroff is certainly
telegenic. But the incredible thing about “Separated” is that he
also knows when to get out of the way. He’s been the leading
journalist in the country to keep beating the drum about this awful
story, but he knows it’s not about him. And his “talking head”
time is appropriately limited.

Instead, Morris dramatizes the kind of dangers that so many migrants
face when fleeing Central America. Working not with reenactments as
much as poetic narrative composites of what any number of migrants
might experience on their journey, Morris focuses on a young mother
(Gabriela Cartol) and her son (Diego Armando Lara Lagunes) as they
pack the belongings they want to take with them, then set out on foot
over rough terrain. They sneak aboard a freight train to carry them
north. The boy almost drowns when they swim across a river. And
finally, they’re apprehended by ICE agents after they’ve crossed
the U.S. border. Then, they’re separated.

These scenes, filmed in Mexico and with “Roma” and “Bardo”
production designer Eugenio Caballero providing an immersive level of
lived-in detail, are a direct conduit to emotion. It’s impossible
not to empathize with what they’re going through, and marvel at
their hope, misplaced though it may be, of what America could provide.
It’s a stark contrast to the parallel narrative of how the family
separation policy got off the ground, how U.S. agencies had their
mission twisted so that they became tools of fear. The Office of
Refugee Resettlement, which always had been in charge of unaccompanied
children sent to the border (often in hopes of them meeting up with a
family member already in the U.S.), instead took the lead on taking
children _away_ from their parents when they were already
accompanying them. It was a complete reversal of the ORR’s mission.
And all to send two messages: Don’t come here. And to the American
people: Look how tough we are.

The head of the ORR who carried out this policy, Scott Lloyd, is
interviewed on-camera by Morris and comes across like a dullard. But
Morris spends significant time showing how such a dehumanizing policy
came about: By imagining emails, all in the public record and an FOIA
request away, being written by Lloyd and others as they’re trying to
formulate this policy. These are antiseptic animated recreations
totally at odds with the urgent humanity of the mother-son journey
Morris has dramatized. The emails bear a tone of office-like
formality, with the distinct impersonality of corporate-speak. It’s
all about the senders and recipients “getting aligned” on the
policy and issuing “quick clarifications” and correcting
misunderstandings in a way where no one person bears responsibility
for everything. It’s human suffering masked with red tape, and
indifference so profound that the separated kids being reduced to
numbers on a spreadsheet is even still too much. One accusation
against Lloyd in the film alleges he suggested not even keeping those
spreadsheets of the kids, thus possibly deliberately losing track of
what kids belong to what parents, at all. (Lloyd has long since denied
that claim.
[[link removed]])

Then there’s the soul-obliterating audio of the kids in cages crying
and a heartless guard mocking them by saying, “Well, we have an
orchestra here! What’s missing is a conductor.” Like many other
moments in “Separated,” this had existed before. Morris’s
mission here, like Soboroff’s in his book, is simply to capture
these moments in a format where we won’t just forget about them when
the next crisis dominates the news cycle. A feature film has a staying
power, an ability to lodge itself in your brain, that the endless
churn of 24/7 cable news simply never will. All that coverage on MSNBC
or “NBC Nightly News” in 2018 was a first draft of history. A
feature documentary is the more polished, peer-reviewed draft, the one
that won’t just be buried under a succession of first drafts of
other stories.

With its punchy 93-minute running time, “Separated” seems
calculated on Morris’s part to break through in an attention economy
where attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter and outrage
about one thing only lasts until there’s the next thing to be
outraged about. There’s probably a deeper version of this movie that
could have been made, one that really addresses the life cycle of the
public’s empathy. One that even holds a critical lens up to, say,
MSNBC, which has offered airtime to ex-Trump officials such as Olivia
Troye and Stephanie Grisham, now apparently on the right side of
history because they’ve spoken out against the former president. But
when kids were in cages, they did not resign their posts.

That’s not what “Separated” is. And maybe that would be asking
too much. When Trump held up his squiggle signature and ended the
separation policy in July 2018, that was the end of it for many.
Morris and Soboroff remind us very clearly of what it would take to
bring the policy back: simply another stroke of that pen.

___________________

CHRISTIAN BLAUVELT i_s the Digital Director of IndieWire, involved in
running all site operations from the Product side to Editorial, where
he top edits the News team, which is composed of his hires. _

* Film
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* Rilm Review
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* Documentary Film
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* 'Separated'
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* Errol Morris
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* Jacob Soboroff
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* Trump's Family Separation Policy
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* Immigration Policy
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