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La Biennale di Venezia

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Cinema

Separated

Out of Competition
Director:
Errol Morris
Production:
NBC News Studios (Molly O’Brien), Participant (Diane Weyermann, Jeff Skoll), Errol Morris, Robert Fernandez, Molly O’Brien, Steven Hathaway, Jacob Soboroff
Running Time:
93’
Language:
English
Country:
USA, Mexico
Main Cast:
Gabriela Cartol, Diego Armando, Lara Lagunes - Jonathan White, Allyn Sualog, Jacob Soboroff, Scott Lloyd, Elaine Duke, Lee Gelernt (as themselves)
Cinematographer:
Igor Martinović
Editor:
Steven Hathaway
Production Designer:
Eugenio Caballero
Costume Designer:
Andrea Manuel
Music:
Paul Leonard-Morgan
Sound:
Lee Salevan
From the novel:Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff

synopsis

Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Based on NBC Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, Morris merges explosive interviews with whistleblowing officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together, they reveal that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. Against this backdrop— with hundreds of families still separated years later— audiences can begin to grasp the US government’s role in this unthinkable horror and be warned that we are on the verge of allowing it to happen again.

director's statement

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.

PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION

PRODUCTION 1: NBC News Studios – Molly OBrien, Robby Ferandez
100 Universal City Plaza
91608, Universal City, United States of America
Tel. 1 747 324 3700
Molly.OBrien@nbcuni.com
fernandez@moxiepictures.com

PRODUCTION 2: Participant - Jeff Skoll
3520 Wesley Street
90232-2433, Culver City, United States of America
Tel. 1 310) 550-5100
lkim@participant.com

PRESS OFFICE : Emilie Spiegel
Cinetic PR
26 Broadway
10004, New York, United States of America
Tel. 516-524-9392
Emilie@cineticmedia.com

INTERNATIONAL PRESS OFFICE: Claudia Tomassini + Associates
press@claudiatomassini.com


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Biennale Cinema
Biennale Cinema