2024-09-02 02:48:35
One of US President Donald Trump’s most controversial legacies, the separation of refugee families at the Mexican border, is addressed in a new film by Errol Morris. The Oscar-winning documentarian presented it at the Venice festival this week.
The film, titled Separated, details how the Trump administration has quietly tightened its crackdown on undocumented immigrants and begun removing children from parents who entered the US with them without permission. Most often, these were persons from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador. The aim of the measure was to deter other refugees from traveling to the US.
“I didn’t agree with a lot of the Trump administration’s decisions, but I never would have thought that harming children would become part of the government’s policy,” the film’s director, Errol Morris, said in Venice. “I was interested in what those people thought they were doing or what they were justifying it to themselves. When I filmed a series of interviews on this topic, I realized that no one had thought about it, which is perhaps the scariest thing,” he adds.
Film director Errol Morris at the Venice Film Festival. | Photo: Reuters
The Trump administration began implementing zero tolerance for refugees in the spring of 2018. Back then, when authorities detained someone at the border without documents, they sent adults into custody.
According to the law, however, their children were not allowed there, and the officials forcibly took them away from them and sent them to makeshift tents or camps. They were created, for example, in hastily rebuilt warehouses or supermarkets.
The footage of the children being kept in rooms separated by cages and wire netting caused an uproar in the US and around the world. British Prime Minister Theresa May at the time expressed deep concern, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the procedure unacceptable.
The film Separated also includes a live segment about a boy separated from his mother. | Photo: Kamen Velkovsky
Trump finally backed down in June 2018 and signed an executive order ending family separation. He also ordered the return of the taken children to the migrants.
A film about the case has now been made based on a four-year-old book by NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff called Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. The documentary puts the events in a wider context.
He reminds that even the previous Republican and Democratic governments in the USA did not know how to deal with illegal migration on the US-Mexico border. “Migration wasn’t just a problem under the Trump administration, Trump just pushed it to absolutely horror proportions. There has to be a better way to deal with it,” the film’s author, Errol Morris, told the AP agency.
He obtained official data from the US government, according to which at least 4,227 children were taken from refugees. More than 1,000 still live separately. The film features federal officials who have seen family separation up close. The film also contains an animated part, showing the story of a little boy separated from his mother, what refugees experience on their way to the USA.
Those who enforced the controversial practice of separating families, i.e. Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller and Secretary of Justice Jeff Sessions, refused to grant an interview to the filmmaker, adds the British newspaper Guardian.
Morris told the AP that he wanted to show the film to as many people as possible before the US presidential election in November. “For me, it is essential that the film gets out before the election. I want as many people as possible to see it before then, and I hope that it can have some influence on their decision-making,” declares the filmmaker.
Donald Trump recently promised to tighten border measures if he wins the November election and becomes the US president again. He did not rule out the possibility that he would again order the separation of refugee families.
The 76-year-old author of the film Errol Morris became famous for the 2003 documentary called Fog of War, in which he interviewed former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the bombing of Tokyo, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the consequences of the US war in Vietnam. The film won Morris an Oscar for best documentary.
It was also remarkable that the author invented a device called the Interrotron during filming. It projects the image of the interviewer and the interviewee onto a reading device with translucent mirrors placed in front of the camera lens. Thanks to this, Morris does not lose eye contact with the respondent. At the same time, the viewer has the feeling that the person in question is looking into the lens and talking to him the whole time.
Later, Morris also filmed award-winning documentaries about the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib and the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Most recently, the Oscar-winning filmmaker completed a documentary portrait of the writer John le Carré. His new film Separated is now being presented out of competition at the Venice Festival.
Video: Shocking footage of children at the US border. They live in caged cubicles separated from their parents (20/06/2018)
Migrant children separated from their parents by officials at the US-Mexico border have ended up in a detention facility in McAllen, Texas. | Video: Reuters