Separated — And the Power of Documentary

There are few filmmakers who can claim their work has had true and tangible social impact. Without a doubt, Errol Morris is one of them.

Oscar-winner Errol Morris’s newest documentary Separated – winner of The Social Justice Award sponsored by the Fund for Santa Barbara and screened at this year’s SBIFF – takes a hard look at the policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border enacted during Donald Trump’s first term.

If there is such a thing as categorical evil, it is this policy. A manifestation of cruelty, Morris methodically examines how the separation of families – of “state created orphans” – was in fact the point of the policy, not a by-product of a complicated bureaucracy. It was designed and implemented to purposefully inflict harm with the goal to deter people from coming to the U.S. for a better life. And at the time of the making of this film, it’s estimated that over a thousand children still have not be reunited with their families. Let that sink in.

Errol Morris, a legacy documentarian, is most well-known for his groundbreaking 1988 film, The Thin Blue Line, a movie that focuses on Randall Dale Adams, a man who was tried and convicted of murdering a Dallas police officer in 1976, while always maintaining his innocence. Morris’ documentary was crucial in not only commuting Adams’ death sentence, but ultimately exonerating him in 1989.

In that film, Morris utilized reenactments to highlight the imperfect nature of memory, and how memories could determine someone’s guilt or innocence. It was a controversial style at the time, with detractors claiming reenactments go against the documentary ethos. Morris utilized this style to expertly highlight the subjectivity of memory and nuance of truth, similar to how Kurosawa used it decades earlier in his masterpiece Rashomon. It proved to be incredibly effective in Morris’ film, helping save a man’s life.

In his new film, Morris once again uses reenactments, this time to show a mother and child making the dangerous journey to the U.S. Here, the style is used to bring us into a desperate family’s world as they traverse a hostile landscape where they ultimately land in the arms of a hostile people.

If there’s one criticism of the film, it’s that we don’t hear firsthand from any families that were directly affected by this barbaric policy. Rather we mostly get our info from a variety of low to mid-level bureaucrats that did their best to fight back and expose the cruelty. The rest of the major players of the policy refused to comment.

Here Morris makes a crucial, but important point: the bad guys aren’t just your usual far right boogeymen. We’re reminded that the Biden administration chose to keep most of Trump’s border policies in place. And during Biden’s presidency, Congress failed to enact any laws that would prevent family separation from becoming policy again. We’re left not only scratching our heads, but also left with a burning anger. Were the cries of indignation from the Democratic Party simply performative? Promises of change have never felt more hollow.

Throughout Separated, Morris uses a zoetrope motif, and that ever-spinning children’s toy feels like the perfect metaphor for where we are now. Trump is back in office, and his administration has signaled that it’d be open to a policy like family separation again. That’s not to mention the major increase in ICE raids and deportation. Are we doomed to live in this never-ending nightmarish loop of cruelty, becoming increasingly numb – not only to the violence and trauma – but also to the documentaries that highlight such devastation? Are we destined, as a country, to repeat the same human rights atrocities again and again?

As Errol Morris has said, “the proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.” A movie like Separated can help us examine our own errors and resist the apathy and hopelessness generated by endless cycles of traumatic news events. We can examine the errors of those in charge, and feel empowered as a collective to hold leaders and politicians on both sides accountable; and to make it known we won’t stand for policies of large scale cruelty, nor will we stand forfor inaction.

Because the power of documentary filmmaking isn’t just its ability to save lives or expose corruption; it also has the potential to light a fire within us – to probe us to ask questions, help us reflect on how we as a community play an integral role in creating the world we want, and how it can empower us to defy a status quo that prioritizes oppression and brutality. We don’t have to be separated. But coming together takes work. What we need to remember that the struggle is worth it.