Separated

Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. He merges explosive interviews with whistleblowing officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together, they reveal that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose.  

During his first presidential term Donald Trump enacted a policy of separating migrant families, taking children away from their parents. His intention was to use terror as a deterrent. ‘When you have that policy, people don’t come,’ he said. In interviews with whistleblowers and with the main architects and implementers – like Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions – director Errol Morris (Fog of War, American Dharma) methodically dissects this inhumane policy.  

Although the policy was revised after massive public outcry, one of the most heartbreaking aspects is that much documentation was strategically ‘lost’ in order to avoid legal action. To this day, as many as 1.000 children remain unaccounted for.1 Against this backdrop – with hundreds of families still separated years later – audiences can begin to grasp the US government’s role in this unthinkable horror and be warned that we are on the verge of allowing it to happen again.