SEPARATED (Errol Mmorris 2024)

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ERROL MORRIS: SEPARATED (2024)

Documentary heavy Errol Morris takes on the worst of the US immigration policies

"The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages," begins Xan Brooks' Guardian review of Erroll Morris' new film. In his typically austere and forceful documentary, MOrris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) discloses that the steps to prevent family separation at the US-Mexico border as a weapon against immigrants from happening again simply "have not been taken."

At first, even for much of the way, I felt an internal objectiion to the film's running dramatizations showing chunky little "Diego" separated from his lean, sad mom, and other staged scenes of the detention and separation of children under the Trump administration. Then I realized it was important to identify. What was done to children for several years at the US-Mexico border is among the saddest and most traumatic of experiences a child can have, lonely, terrifying, horrifying.

It's also stated that the US Congress essentially enabled this cruelty. They allowed it, and have not barred it from happening again. It was not our elected representatives but a civil rights lawyer, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, who painstakingly disabled it. He is still around (he is one of the talking heads here), and Gelernt may have to do his job all over again. And the damage remains. Of the thousands separated, not all have been reunited.

Family separations began in the summer of 2017, prior to the public announcement of the "zero tolerance" policy in April 2018. The policy was officially adopted across the entire US–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. The practice of family separation continued for at least eighteen months after the policy's official end, with an estimated 1,100 families separated between June 2018 and the end of 2019. In total, more than 5,500 children, including infants, were separated from their families. Lawyers working to reunite families stated that 666 children still had not been found as of November 2020, and by March 2024 the ACLU increased the estimate to 2,000 children. The damage is lasting. The government did not keep records about chldren and parent that would enable them to be runited.

When the children are toddlers, it's pointed out, they can't identify their parents. Their mothers to them are "mom." Unlike ordinary arrests, where adults know where their children are when they are sent to prison, these immigrant separations sent children into a bureaucratic no man's land.

Now that Donald Trump is coming back in office as President of the United States, there is nothing to prevent him from installing officials in charge of immigration enforcement who will restart family separation. We know Trump is quite lacking in human empathy. He sees the policy as a harsh but effective way of discouraging immigrants from south of the border from entering illegally with their children, if they know that if caught they will have their children taken away from them. But is that even true? Illegal immigrants do what they do out of desperation. Their circumstances are dire.

If Erroll Morris' style is cold and austere, it is the more horrifying to observe the inhumanity involved here. Where else would parents and children be arbitrarily separated? I could only think of the Nazis. Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer, however, states that in pursuing the cases in court, he avoided inflammatory language. But while film's restraint is highly effective, all its examples are dramatizations or mockups of the real thing, which loses impact. If not quite Morris' best work, this is stylish filmmking, however, and it also packs an emotional punch: the Guardian rightly calls it "quietly furious.' This is a message that stays with you.

Separated, 93 mins., debuted at Venice Aug. 29, 2024 and showed at Telluride Aug. 31. The film had a one-week theatrical run at the IFC Center from Oct. 4 and launched on MSNBC Dec 7. VOD release Dec. 17. The film has qualified for Oscar considereation. Metacritic rating: 75%.