Cruel Separation relates the story of General Pinochet’s American-backed military coup in Chile on the 11th of September 1973, from the point of view of four women, with very different perspectives, who lived through it.

The women are from widely different backgrounds: Hortensia Bussi de Allende is the widow of President Salvador Allende who was killed in the coup; Joan Jara is the English widow of Chilean political singer-songwriter, Victor Jara, who was also brutally killed; Joyce Horman, whose story was made internationally famous in Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning film “Missing”; Angela Jeria de Bachelet, wife of an Air Force General loyal to President Allende, experienced the brutality of the military first hand, after her husband had been killed at the hands of former colleagues.

Donald Sutherland narrates this story of four women who share their experiences of love and loss during the darkest days in South America’s oldest democracy