Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris merges bombshell interviews with government officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together they show that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. Against this backdrop, audiences can begin to absorb the U.S. government’s role in developing and implementing policies that have kept over 1300 children without confirmed reunifications years later, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Direction
Morris's Interrotron makes liars reveal themselves.
Editing
Stark juxtaposition of testimonies and family reenactments.
Writing
Soboroff's book structure, sharpened to indictment.
Director
Errol Morris
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Morris invented the Interrotron—basically FaceTime before FaceTime—to make subjects look directly at camera while seeing his face. Here it weaponizes eye contact against evasive officials.
The reenactment structure deliberately echoes his 1988 'The Thin Blue Line,' which freed an innocent man from death row. This time, no exoneration is possible—only permanent damage.
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