ABOUT THE FILM

LOGLINE

Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Errol Morris incisively probes the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Merging narrative vignettes of one migrant family’s plight with hard-hitting interviews with government officials, Morris paints a jaw-dropping picture of the state-sponsored crisis of cruelty, as hundreds of families remain separated today.

LONG SYNOPSIS

Issues around immigration remain a perennial point of contention across the American political spectrum. But the US administration’s alarming embrace of anti-immigrant rhetoric in tandem with punitive federal policies took the American immigration debate to a new peak. No policy, however, was as morally dubious and publicly polarizing as the U.S. administration’s dehumanizing “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that in 2018 resulted in U.S. authorities deliberately taking thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border.

The extraordinary cruelty of this political calculation was not a byproduct of the surging immigration rhetoric, but rather its purpose. By inflicting such unspeakable trauma on the families—the majority of them from the Central American countries Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the government aimed to deter others from traveling to the U.S. seeking asylum.

With searing incisiveness, Errol Morris, the Academy Award®-winning filmmaker behind seminal non-fiction works including The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, probes at this bleak chapter in recent American history by merging hard-hitting interviews with government officials who were both alarmed by or complicit with these policy decisions, as well with artful narrative vignettes that immerse the viewer in the migrants’ plight as they journey across the border.

Bombshell revelations from Jonathan White, at the time a top official in the Office of Refugee Settlement, about the “state-created orphans” and the ongoing efforts to reunite the unprecedented number of children, some of them infants, with their family members, paint a jaw-dropping picture of the immediate and long-lasting effects of the family separations. Yet, it’s the dramatic portrayal of a Guatemalan mother and her young son, embarking on a dangerous journey to escape poverty and violence in their homeland, only to be held apart for months in the U.S., that transforms intellectual understanding into visceral empathy.

Those narrative vignettes, shot in Mexico with local crew and talent—including Academy Award-winning production designer Eugenio Caballero and actress Gabriela Cartol—serve to emotionally and authentically illustrate the underlying trauma of what migrants endure in pursuit of a better life. The resulting film—based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”—is a devastatingly moving and thoroughly researched exposé of how several high-ranking government officials became willingly complicit in this horror. With hundreds of families still separated today, it’s a story without an ending in sight.

Director Errol Morris

Producers Errol Morris, Robert Fernandez, Molly O’Brien, Steven Hathaway

Executive Producers Liz Cole, Noah Oppenheim, Elizabeth Fischer, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Jacob Soboroff

Co-Producers Kamen Velkovsky, Molly Rokosz, Joshua Kearney

Editor Steven Hathaway

Director of Photography Igor Martinović

Production Designer Eugenio Caballero

Score By Paul Leonard-Morgan

Starring Gabriela Cartol, Diego Armando Lara Lagunes

FESTIVALS
2024: Venice (World Premiere), Telluride

AVAILABLE TERRITORIES
The World

EXHIBITION FORMATS
DCP, Digital Download