‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

Errol Morris’s bleak documentary Separated has gained in relevance since it premiered with more ‘state-created orphans’ to come under a second Trump administration

He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.

“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”

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