Actress and screenwriter Zoe Kazan took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to share a haunting (and surprisingly timely) recollection of her time shooting Kelly Reichardt’s historical drama “Meek’s Cutoff” in Oregon in 2010. For Kazan, who has long used her social media accounts to passionately speak out about political and cultural issues, the story offered the chance to synthesize her thoughts on President Trump’s controversial child border separation policy through her own experiences.
In a thread, Kazan wrote: “When we were shooting Meek’s Cutoff on the salt flats of Eastern Oregon, I woke in the night to a pervasive drone. It filled the air like a fire alarm, but it sounded like moaning. I lay awake for hours. In the morning, the motel owners explained: On the big commercial ranches nearby, the calves had been separated from their mothers in the dark of that morning. The sound was the mother cows crying for their taken babies. ‘It happens every year,’ they told us. It was part of the landscape of their lives.”
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She continued, “And I can’t stop thinking about how our President said ‘these aren’t people, these are animals’ about immigrants seeking asylum, and how he must want us to hear the cries of these babies as the cries of animals: as part of the cost of living, as a byproduct of capitalism.”
Kazan is hardly the only star to speak out against the current policy. As The Washington Post reports, Jessica Chastain, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kumail Nanjiani, Reese Witherspoon, Jimmy Kimmel, Chrissy Teigen, and many more have also used their social media accounts to draw attention to the issue and to highlight ways in which the general public might help those in need.
Elsewhere, a number of talents associated with Fox, including Seth MacFarlane and Judd Apatow, have fired back at the media conglomerate for the way the zero-tolerance immigration policy has been reported on by its Fox News channel. Check out Kazan’s full Twitter thread below.
When we were shooting Meek's Cutoff on the salt flats of Eastern Oregon, I woke in the night to a pervasive drone. It filled the air like a fire alarm, but it sounded like moaning. I lay awake for hours. In the morning, the motel owners explained:
— zoe kazan (@zoeinthecities) June 20, 2018
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