By Peter Keough

Separated is a compelling, urgent, and essential examination of an ongoing injustice (over 1300 children remain separated today, according to the Department of Homeland Security) that every American should see and ponder before going to the polls.

Commander Jonathan White, the former Deputy Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement  in Separated. Photo: Nafis Azad

Errol Morris was hoping that the network that owns his new film Separated, adapted from Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, would broadcast it before the November 5 presidential election. But they chose instead to hold it until December 7. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X on October 5. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”

For those who want to see it ahead of its release, it will be screening on October 27 at 4 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre as part of the GlobeDocs Film Festival. Morris and Soboroff will be participating in a Q&A after the film so you might ask them what their inferences might be.

The film itself, though not Morris’s best, may be his most urgent, impassioned, and topical. It renews the focus on an injustice that might have gotten lost in the long litany of abuses perpetrated by the Trump administration: the 2017 policy of separating refugee children from their parents at the southern border. When the full details emerged back then, however, it aroused a firestorm of outrage from the public and the media. A court order ended it, but its baleful impact lingers and the potential for its return, or worse,  remains.

The notion originated with Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, his point man for stirring anti-immigrant hysteria amongst his followers (“Who is this fucking guy?” Soboroff says in an interview, recalling what he said to himself after first hearing Miller speak). The idea was to separate kids from their parents, not in cases where their safety or protection was at stake, which was standard procedure at the time, but as a uniform policy. It served no other purpose than to inflict pain — the cruelty was the point. This, it was reasoned, would put fear in the hearts of those who might consider entering the country illegally. It would also delight the rabid base of the MAGA movement.

But cooler heads saw that it might not go over too well with the majority of Americans and so it was determined to slow-walk the process without calling too much attention to it or exposing its true intent.  Morris’s interviews with the government officials who resisted  — especially Commander Jonathan White, the former Deputy Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement —  reveal the disingenuousness, dishonesty, and corruption of that position. These are people who remained true to their ideals and are the kind who would be first purged from another Trump administration.

To make his case, Morris introduces two devices to supplement the standard mix of interviews and archival footage. One is more of a filigree: a recurrent animated snippet comparing the slats of the border wall to the slots of a zoetrope. It is a clever, even poetic fusion of that monolith of separation and the perhaps liberating mechanics of a cinema prototype.

But the other device I have mixed feelings about: an invented, recurrent tale–– taken from the Soboroff book apparently–– of a fictitious mother and child representative of the thousands of others who have gone through the ordeal of fleeing their homeland for asylum in the US. True, it does dramatize the plight of immigrants beyond the damning but abstract testimony of those involved – though it would be hard to top the anger and pathos stirred by the brief audio of children in custody weeping for their parents and being taunted by a border guard. Also to its credit, the narrative concludes with a subtle scene that offers insight into the more profound and lasting effects of this cruelty.

But this kind of poetic license might cause some to question the realities presented in the film. Unlike the reenactments in Morris’s masterpiece The Thin Blue Line (1988), where the recreation of events was tentative, speculative, and inchoate, all the better to reflect the process of determining the truth. Here it serves as a generic example intended to illustrate a broader reality. The fiction is meant to engender an emotional response, intimating that the cold hard facts might not be enough. Instead, the strategy might arouse resentment in viewers who feel they are being manipulated. Were there no actual separated immigrant families available to serve this purpose?

In short, I don’t think the story of Diego and his mother is going to win over any hearts and minds that aren’t already outraged. So would releasing the film before the election even make a difference? Trump’s repeated promises to deport millions, his toxic lies about Haitians eating pets, his vows to prosecute political opponents, not to mention the dirty laundry list of appalling programs in Project 2025, have not, if polls can be believed, put a dent in any of his support. Nor does it help that the film delivers a both-sides-ism point at its end, informing us that, although the Biden administration hasn’t itself implemented family separation, its immigration policies have not exactly been enlightened. Nonetheless, Separated is a compelling, urgent, and essential examination of an ongoing injustice (over 1300 children remain separated today, according to the Department of Homeland Security) that every American should see and ponder before going to the polls.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).