Art is not reality and reality is not art, although there is often confusion as to which is which. And then there is the inevitable question about how to depict reality in art, as if there were one way rather than myriad possibilities. I have wrestled my entire life with the question of how to depict the world, how to preserve the deep ambiguities in how we try to apprehend it. Separated is my most recent attempt. How do we capture the horrors of US border policies without repeating things we have already seen, perhaps ad nauseam? How do we capture the underlying emotional reality of what is going on? The tragedy of parents separated from their children, powerless to do anything. Or of the children, incapable of comprehending their nightmarish new lives. How do we highlight the bureaucratic machinations behind the scenes? The opportunism, the institutional indifference. I have tried to construct a bridge between drama and interview. Dramatic scenes played out by two extraordinary actors, Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando Lara Lagunes, depicting a family in flight, torn and broken apart by their arrival in the United States. Interviews include voices seldom heard in the news: Elaine Duke, former acting head of the Department of Homeland Security; Jallyn Sualog, a bureaucrat in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the mismanaged department forced to take custody of the separated children; and the hero of the movie, Jonathan White, who decided to jeopardise his career by reaching out with a story that needed to be told. Today, this story serves as much a cautionary tale for the future as it does an exploration of the terrible misdeeds of our recent past.
