Venice 2024 (Out of Competition): Separated (by Errol Morris) | Review
Celebrated director of the renowned documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris, exhibits a timely reminder of the vicious policies favoured by the Trump administration at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
Separated, based on reporter Jacob Soboroff’s book, combines talking-heads interviews with docu-drama in order to recount the events of the family separation policy put into action during Trump’s presidency in the USA. There are a few forces at play here; the most dominant in the documentary being Jonathan White – a Coordinating Official at the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR). He meticulously and passionately leads the audience through events and policies that turned his formerly humanitarian job into a dreadful nightmare for him, his coworkers and people and children in his care.
While the Office for Refugee Resettlement’s initial mission was to serve as a temporary shelter for underage refugees and asylum seekers who cross the USA border, their organisation was used for the complete opposite – as a tool for separating families in order to discourage people running away from crime gangs and excruciating poverty to head for the USA. Even if you aren’t an ardent follower of American politics, the images of children in cages at the US border will ring a bell. Those cages were the straightforward result of what was considered a winning political strategy according to the documentary.
Separated allows the whistleblowers and reporters a great deal of time to recount how a primarily philanthropic organisation turned into a terrorising mechanism of obduction. Morris intersects these statements with Zoetrope animations that add illustration to words and with an interspersed dramatised reconstruction of a mother and son who set out on the gruelling journey from Guatemala only to meet the scariest enemy once they reach ‘safety’.
Unfortunately, it is precisely the visual additions to Jonathan White’s fired up righteousness and his colleagues’ tempered statements that devalue what is said more than add to our experience and empathy. Especially if we consider the cold resignation with which Diego Armando and Lara Lagunes play a mother and son to represent all of at least 4000 children and their parents who were abused with the family separation policies. Their fictional journey to the US border does nothing to humanise them. The reasons for their escape from Guatemala are not illuminated, there are barely any interactions between mother and son that would show us their bond and the final reunion hardly better than a lifetime movie.
The audience was eager to huff and puff at the deplorable statements about immigrant families from those that came up with the family separation policy just like they were fast to laugh at dim-witted statements from an obvious apparatchik put at the head of ORR in order to dutifully carry out whatever was asked of him. The events of Separated are easy to be appalled at and it practically pats you on the back for being a good person for being appalled.
However, in a touch more than 90 minutes of runtime, many pertinent questions feel like they were left unasked. For instance it wasn’t investigated if anyone would have any benefits from separating babies and young children from parents and ‘losing’ them in the system. Another is the insistence on deterrents not only at borders but in law enforcement in general when psychology has shown time and again that harsher punishments don’t produce less crime. Also, an interview with those who went through a forced separation would certainly produce a stronger impact on the viewer.
It is White that makes Separated worth a watch, a fireball for the cause and wellbeing of what he calls underserved populations (definitely not to be mistaken for undeserved) delivers a winning rebel yell. He is most impressive when he recalls how the separation of children was suspended in court. The judge, he says, saw someone who would have done anything to return the children to their families. And I would have done anything to return the children to their families and I gathered a team of people who would have done anything to return the children to their families. It is effortless to become recruited as his supporter.
Explore our exclusive coverage of the 81st Venice International Film Festival here.
