Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris incisively probes the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations.

Issues around immigration remain a perennial point of contention across the American political spectrum. But the US administration’s alarming embrace of anti-immigrant rhetoric in tandem with punitive federal policies took the American immigration debate to a new peak. No policy, however, was as morally dubious and publicly polarizing as the U.S. administration’s dehumanizing “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that in 2018 resulted in U.S. authorities deliberately taking thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border– a majority of them being Central American.

With searing incisiveness, Morris, the filmmaker behind seminal non-fiction works including The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, probes at this bleak chapter in recent American history by merging hard-hitting interviews with government officials who were both alarmed by or complicit with these policy decisions, as well with artful narrative vignettes that immerse the viewer in the migrants’ plight as they journey across the border.

The resulting film—based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”—is a devastatingly moving and thoroughly researched exposé of how several high-ranking government officials became willingly complicit in this horror. With hundreds of families still separated today, it’s a story without an ending in sight.