VENICE, Italy—Immigration is out of control. That’s a common talking point all over the world. The immigration crisis has become one of the hot-button issues of our time, one that just about everyone has a strong opinion of. In the Trump administration, the solution was a radical new policy to curb immigration and end catch and release: forcefully separating parents from their children at the border. The decision was made to act as a deterrent, but can you ever deter an utterly desperate person?
That policymaking is at the center of Errol Morris’ Separated, a haunting and highly engaging exploration of the crisis that just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Morris takes experts including former employees of the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—an organization you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of—and creates an urgent portrait of one of the darkest moments in American history; while it covers how the separation came to fruition and why people will still risk everything to come to America (“Somehow that journey was less of a threat than the gangs trying to recruit them,” one OFRR worker claims), it’s largely focused on the bureaucracy of putting separation into action, and the efforts to overturn it.
That may sound dull—if bureaucracy has a reputation for anything, it’s not entertainment—but Morris employs every dramatic trick in his arsenal to heighten the impact of Separated. The dramatization is the most successful of his tools; following the story of a young Guatemalan boy and his mother as they take on the treacherous journey to America is riveting. It captures both the extraordinary physical challenge of traveling that distance and the mental distress that comes with such an undertaking. It also highlights the traumatic experience of the separation itself, revealing without feeling too heavy-handed how such a barbaric practice impacts children, and how these separations have irrevocable consequences.
Overlaying dialogue with opposing visuals also works well here, with various people like former presidential advisor Stephen Miller and former President Donald Trump talking about how they'll secure America's borders playing over images of a mother and son risking everything for a chance at a better life. The mixing highlights how absurd the anti-immigration rhetoric can feel: There's certainly merit in protecting borders and national security, but is a young mother and son really what everyone is so scared of? The effect of overlaying dialogue with the dramatization with the talking heads is unmistakable: While these conversations about what happened are occurring, people are risking their lives for a chance at a better life right now.
Not all the elements Morris employs are equally successful. Separated spends a lot of time following email chains, complete with what are supposed to be dramatic sound effects each time someone new is added to the chain. But those sounds are more jarring than anything. The camera doesn’t focus on enough specific details, or explain any of the plentiful acronyms, creating the effect of scanning through emails to see if anything is important, and occasionally finding something that is. There are close-ups on fragments of sentences that leave you expecting something remarkable in the next line when that’s never the case. This is a film about bureaucracy, but recreating these emails to such effect feels limp. There are only so many times adding someone to an email is an exciting viewing experience, and that number is zero.
Separated deals with extremely heavy material and handles it without ever feeling exploitative. The videos of the children in the facilities are horrifying, but all faces are rightfully blurred. Children’s experiences aren’t discussed on an individual level. This isn’t a film about particular cases—instead, it's an exploration of how something as hideous as willingly separating children from their parents can happen on a systemic level, and the incredible efforts to stop it from happening.
There are no easy answers to the bureaucracy and Separated avoids any neat conclusions. A messy situation is given great coherence thanks to whip-smart editing and a steady but never manic pace, with every big statement, like one observation that “Harm to children was part of the point” the space to breathe.
Nobody makes a film about seemingly everyday people arresting better than Morris. The filmmaker is not one for subtlety either, and he has no interest in trying to keep his distance from the subject. It’s abundantly clear that Morris is against the separations, using his own voice to help emphasize the impact of some of the most damning statements made by the experts involved. That’s part of the point of Separated, urging everyone to have a stance; there is no room for complacency when human rights are involved.
There’s something damning that comes through watching Separated—the idea that things happened and were allowed to happen because of ambition. To advance in their careers, people were willing to enact laws that would cause unspeakable and irreversible harm. Separated is an exploration of a particular moment in very contemporary American history and an urgent shaking out of complacency: If we’re not careful, it can all happen again.
