SBIFF: Separated Wins Top Prize from The Fund
A SCATHING EXAMINATION OF IMMIGRATION POLICY under the Trump administration, Separated has won the 2025 Social Justice Award from The Fund for Santa Barbara, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting organizations that seek progressive change. Partnering with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the Fund sought to award a film that supports social change through the advancement of economic, environmental, political, racial or social justice.
“We believe that movies can create movements and Separated is such an urgent example,” said Eder Gaona-Macedo, Executive Director, Fund for Santa Barbara. “The Administration’s recent actions, within the last week, have traumatized our immigrant neighbors, inflicting fear and uncertainty. Immigrants are the backbone of our economy—now more than ever, we must stand up to protect their rights. We hope the film screening and award will galvanize the region to support our immigrant communities.”
Based on the reporting of journalist Jacob Soboroff, (Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Harper Collins, 2020) and under the steady hands of iconic documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, Separated examines the complexity behind one of the more grotesques policies mandated by the Trump administrations: separating migrant families at the border.
Officially know as the “Zero Tolerance” policy, Amnesty International characterized it as “torture,” and the American Academy of Pediatrics said it was “child abuse…that causes irreparable harm to child health.” Allegations, from the ACLU, of sexual abuse, were exposed via the Freedom of Information act. Stitching together personal narratives with investigative journalism, Separated seeks to explain how such an inhumane policy could come to be, let alone be implemented.
Separated was one of four nominees for the Social Justice Award. The other films covered such topics as Jewish-African American allyship in the face of growing racial tensions between the two (All God’s Children), gender identity and acceptance (I’m Your Venus), and a Southern California coastal toxic pollution disaster (Out of Plain Sight). While all four films met the Fund’s criteria for the award, Separated stood out for its breadth of coverage and unflinching lens on the subject.
According to Vanity Fair, the director found himself invested in this story. “It’s hard for me not to believe that these policies were motivated by meanness,” Morris said. “There’s no pragmatic element in it at all.”
