Accepting his party’s nomination for president for the third time, Donald Trump addressed the Republican National Convention in July, returning to a familiar theme.
“We… have an illegal immigration crisis, and it’s taking place right now, as we sit here in this beautiful arena,” he told delegates. “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
Never mind that ABC News fact checkers called his assertion false, writing, “There is no evidence of a major surge in crime caused by recent arrivals and Trump’s claims ignore the fact that crime is down across the country overall.” Never mind, either, that Trump tanked a bipartisan bill that would have addressed immigration reform. When you’ve got an issue that works for you, you keep pounding away at it.
Because the demonization of migrants plays so well to the MAGA base, we cannot rule out that Trump, if he wins election in November, will not reimpose his administration’s ignominious “family separation” policy that tore children from their parents, and produced images of kids – sudden wards of the U.S. government — cloaked in foil blankets, sleeping on cement floors in pens.
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For those who have forgotten what that looked like (and many have) Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris arrives to remind us with his documentary Separated, which just made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It’s an incisive account of how the policy was devised and implemented, and for what purpose.
“This was just blatant, gratuitous cruelty,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt says in the film. It was his legal arguments in 2018 that prompted a federal judge to order the Trump administration to reunite families.
Morris wisely avoids interviewing the kind of administration idealogues who would only have spewed rote talking points – a Stephen Miller, for instance, or a Steve Bannon (the latter was the subject of Morris’s earlier documentary, American Dharma). Instead, the director gets insights from people who were in the trenches as family separations became a top administration priority, like Scott Lloyd, head of the Trump administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, and Cmdr. Jonathan White, who served in the Dept. of Health and Human Services and fought against the policy from the inside. White becomes the conscience of the film (a White knight, one might say), who retained his humanity while others around him were only too willing to ignore the obvious trauma of children taken from their parents.
Morris also benefits from the reporting of Jacob Soboroff, an NBC News correspondent who wrote the book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. The telegenic Soboroff (whole essays could be written about the glories of his Harry Styles-worthy hair) knows the subject matter intimately, but for a journalist working for a mainstream media outlet, he speaks with refreshing candor. Recalling the first time he heard Roy Cohn-doppelgänger Stephen Miller rant about immigrants in 2016, he says he asked, “Who the fuck is this guy?”
Morris has never been shy about filming dramatizations for his documentaries. He used them to wondrous effect in the seminal The Thin Blue Line, illustrating the contradictory accounts of people who claimed to have witnessed the shooting of a Dallas police officer. There are marvelously cinematic recreations in The Pigeon Tunnel, Morris’s documentary from last year that probed the mind of David Cornwell, aka author John le Carré. In Separated, the director creates a storyline of a mother from a Central American country embarking on the long journey to the U.S. border with her son, who is about 10. They endure all sorts of hardships en route, and then things only get worse once they cross the U.S. border – federal agents apprehend them and immediately separate mother and child. These scenes help drive home the emotional reality of what parents and children went through, although it would have been helpful to get a stronger indication of why the fictional mother felt compelled to leave her home country for the U.S.
Perhaps most shocking of all in Separated is the evidence uncovered by Morris and Soboroff that the Trump administration tried to thwart the court order to reunite families. Officials did their best to complicate the process by deliberately failing to keep proper tabs on the whereabouts of children they had seized. The results of that are still being felt today; of the roughly 5,500 kids taken from their parents, more than a thousand still haven’t been reunited with their mom or dad. One of the reasons is that, in some cases, parents were quickly deported even as their children were being moved to other parts of the U.S. by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. It’s not like the government is going to post flyers at the border saying, “Hey, come pick up your kid.”
Separated is an acquisition title out of Venice. One hopes it will be picked up for distribution and released into theaters before the presidential election so that voters – if they aren’t otherwise aware – will know what to expect from a potential second Trump administration.
Title: Separated
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)
Production companies: NBC News Studios, Participant, Fourth Floor, and Moxie Pictures
Director: Errol Morris
Cast: Gabriela Cartol, Diego Armando Lara Lagunes, Jonathan White, Allyn Sualog, Jacob Soboroff, Scott Lloyd, Elaine Duke, Lee Gelernt
Running time: 93’
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