The new documentary by Errol Morris called Separated, which is considered a likely Academy Awards contender for Best Documentary, was made with the plan to share it with the public before the election. The main point of the film is to remind people of the cruel fiasco that was the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy during his presidency: forcibly separating parents from children as a deterrent to illegal immigration along the southern border of the United States.

Trump makes clear in an interview clip shown in the documentary that he intends to revive the sadistic policy if he’s reelected. And the mess his administration made is still with us. According to Separated, an estimated four-thousand-plus families were traumatized for life by the way children were removed and incarcerated. Even toddlers were sometimes held in literal cages for months at a time before the policy was overturned because of the public outcry and eventual legal action.

But there are still over a thousand children who have never been reunited with their parents. Because the policy was being implemented so chaotically, with the separations occurring at such a rapid rate in such horrifying numbers, and record-keeping was deliberately impeded, it became almost impossible to locate the parents of certain children later on.

As one government employee working for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, charged with reuniting families, puts it, “When you ask a two-year-old child what their mother’s name is, they say, ‘Mom.’”

Currently running in theaters in very limited release, meaning New York City and Los Angeles, Separated won’t play widely until it premieres on MSNBC on December 9, over a month after the election. This decision was reportedly made “in part because NBC bosses don’t want to offend Donald Trump.”

Director Morris has aired his grievances about the release on public media:

That [decision] rankled Morris, who suggested political considerations were behind that airdate in post on X, writing, “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”

The documentary is based on the 2020 nonfiction book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by one of NBC’s own reporters, Jacob Soboroff. NBC News Studios was one of the film’s producers, and Soboroff was an executive producer. He appears in the film, interviewed by Morris, indicating the way his reporting and that of other select correspondents was being cynically used to further terrify immigrants and put pressure on Congress to support the draconian policy.

“Harm to the children was part of the point,” according to Jonathan White, who emerges as the angriest of the government officials interviewed. His department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, was dragooned into enforcing the policy after an interlude in 2017 when the program to separate children from parents was running without public knowledge or even official status. White claims, “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it, and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”

Director Morris nails to the wall certain key players in Trump’s administration who would presumably never consent to an interview. One such is Kirstjen Nielsen, who became acting head of the Department of Homeland Security when Elaine Duke was suddenly ousted. As interviewee Duke explains, with an ironic smile accompanying her explanation, she was too much of a “working class type of person” to fit in with Trump’s favored appointees.

Morris then provides a shot of Nielsen, blonde, dressy, and rail-thin, who looks like a Fox news anchor. She runs interference for the despised policy by lying about it in public interviews, arguing that the children are being separated from parents as a matter of course when the parents are imprisoned as illegal immigrants breaking the law. Business as usual, Nielsen argues, denying that deliberately ripping children away from families and locking them up in facilities far from their parents is the whole point of the new policy of deterrence through state-created orphans.

But Morris gets one clueless idiot to agree to an interview: Scott Lloyd, a Trump shill appointed to direct the Office of Refugee Resettlement while the new policy was implemented. Lloyd clearly never watched an Errol Morris film before he agreed to the interview, and it’s a pleasure to watch him squirm when faced with the director’s famous “Interratron,” a specially designed camera that gives interviewees a view of Morris’s face, which makes them feel all too comfortable at first, and which creates the impression for audiences of greater eye contact and direct engagement in his documentaries. Lloyd stutters and shifts in his seat with increasing discomfort under Morris’s questioning when he’s not allowed to get away with repeating the bland PR statements he was clearly hired to deliver.

White says of his former boss, “Scott Lloyd is the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.”

Just exposing the history and inner workings of this heinous policy and making clear the threat of its return gives this film a lot of righteous power. But for those familiar with Morris’s long career in documentary filmmaking, it must be admitted that many of his signature strategies, once so dynamic and compelling in the old days of Gates of Heaven (1978), Vernon, Florida (1981), The Thin Blue Line (1988), Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control (1997), and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999), are getting rote.

For example, back in the 1980s and ’90s, Morris resurrected staged reenactments, which were verboten in documentaries in the previous era of direct cinema and cinema verité. Morris used reenactments in boldly expressive ways in films like The Thin Blue Line, in order to convey the difficulty of getting at the truth and the necessity of working through endless self-serving lies in order to get as close as possible to it.

But in Separated, the now familiar reenactment technique has dwindled down to the unimaginative hiring of two actors (Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando Lara Lagunes) to play a representative mother and child fleeing Guatemala for the United States and being forced apart under the Trump administration’s new policy. Compared to the appalling footage of actual children standing numbly in bare cages wearing silver foil blankets, or the audio-only recordings of real toddlers crying hysterically and being mocked by their guards, interwoven with callous official statements by Trump hirelings, the recurring scenes tracking the fates of a fictional mother and son have much less impact.

Separated features ominous and chilly Philip Glass–like music from Scottish composer Paul Leonard-Morgan. As always, Morris’s style is formally opulent, deliberately foregrounding its own construction, with mesmerizing editing drawing together the complex threads of reportage and weaving them into an assertive filmed argument. Those seeking supposedly “neutral, objective” documentary filmmaking — or rather, the filmmaking style that fakes that illusion best — should look elsewhere.

But even if Morris’s imaginative powers as a filmmaker are ossifying, the subject matter here is so harshly immediate it overcomes the way his formal inventiveness has become formulaic. Separated wipes out a bit of that strange amnesia that’s afflicting so many people under the pressure of too many terrible things happening in concentrated bursts. It was intended to “interfere with the election,” if possible, by reminding voters of one of Trump’s most vicious policies that he vows to reinstate. Instead, by not allowing the film to be shown until December, NBC is attempting to interfere with the election in a different way.