Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (Fog of War) and acclaimed NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff of NBC took aim at the immigration policies of the previous Donald Trump administration in their press conference for Separation at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday.
Morris’s documentary adaptation of Soboroff’s book of the same name examines the Trump administration’s mandate to separate migrant families who crossed the Mexican border into the United States. Before Trump ended the policy, approximately 5,500 families had been separated. As depicted in the documentary’s dramatized sequences, the hardships endured by the families were, frankly, inhumane, with children torn from their parents and held in holding cages. Some were infants.
“The idea that you could somehow harm children as a matter of policy seemed unthinkable. It just seemed wrong, morally wrong,” Morris said, speaking at a news conference for Separation at the Venice Film Festival, where the film has its world premiere. “These are policies that could happen again, and we need to make sure they never happen again.”
Soboroff noted that the combination of his reporting with Morris's skills as a filmmaker, particularly in the film's dramatic reconstruction sequences (in which we see a mother and her son flee to the United States, only to be brutally separated at the border), led to an “emotional truth” to the story that was impossible to reproduce on television news.
“There’s no footage of separations that happen inside detention centers, and Errol and the entire team were able to capture the essence of that,” Soboroff said, “in a way that impacts people in a way that only Errol can.”
While Soboroff was careful to note that the film is not just about Trump — “Trump did this, but none of this would have been possible if it weren’t for decades of bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans, pushing for an immigration policy of deterrence and punishment, designed to harm people” — the potential for a second Trump term was obviously on their minds.
Morris criticized Trump's vice presidential nominee for his silence on the issue of child separation.
“JD Vance seems so concerned about children, families with children [suggesting] that maybe only people with children should have the right to vote in America,” Morris said. “Well, what do you think about policies that deliberately harm children? Is that OK? Is that permissible? Is that something we want to support?”
Morris said it was “essential” Separation is released in the United States before the election. The documentary, a production of NBC News Studios, Participant, Fourth Floor and Moxie Pictures, has not yet found a national release. “You don't know what the effect of anything is going to be,” Morris noted, “but I want to get it out before the election with the hope that it can make a difference.”