On the first night after Josh Sabey and Sarah Perkins moved to Arbon, Idaho, the power went out. It was a bone-chilling December night, one of the coldest in decades. Perkins remembers thinking, “What have we done?” Then a neighbor showed up at their doorstep with a heater, a flashlight and extra blankets.
Arbon is small and secluded — it’s an incorporated community in southeastern Idaho, about a 45-minute drive from both Pocatello and Malad City. When I visited the family in late August, I couldn’t get a cell signal. The area has deep ties to Perkins’ family: Her grandmother grew up there, then her mother. Today, Perkins and Sabey live in the family farmhouse, which still has its brown-patterned linoleum and a chair that belonged to Perkins’ great-grandmother. The family still owns much of the land and rents it to local farmers. Across the street stands a chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, built on land Perkins’ grandparents donated to the church.
Despite those family ties and a warm welcome from neighbors, as filmmakers and writers, Sabey and Perkins aren’t exactly a natural fit in this predominantly agricultural community. They still get asked how long they’re staying.
In their work, they’ve held up a mirror to the depths of human suffering and conflict to then find a common path to healing. Their documentaries about the Columbine school shooting, abortion debates and mental health explore some of the most complex and polarizing topics, but without turning them into partisan arguments.
Their latest documentary, “9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero” tells a lesser-known story about an astonishing act of democracy in action: when 5,000 New Yorkers came together in an innovative type of public meeting to wrestle with how to rebuild the tragedy’s site and honor those who had died.
Like many ranchers and farmers in Arbon, who know the devastation of losing crops and cattle, Perkins and Sabey have lived through loss, too.
They arrived in Arbon four years ago, after police officers and social workers from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the door of their home in Massachusetts in the middle of the night. Three days earlier, during an emergency room visit, a doctor had discovered that their baby had a healing fractured rib and suspected child abuse. Although the investigation found no fault, the authorities took their two boys, then 3 years old and 3 months old.
The incident, and the legal case around it, ignited a national conversation about parental rights and government overreach, sparking a flurry of phone calls from parents whose kids were taken from them. The couple still gets messages from desperate parents who want to know: How do I get my baby back?
Here in Arbon, that question feels far away. Their kids go to a small schoolhouse and ride bikes on dirt roads past old trucks. When we stepped outside, Sabey gestured toward the vast fields of dry yellow grass and rugged horizon: “When the sun shines on those mountains, it’s magical.”
Stories across divides
During our lunch of pulled-pork sandwiches, two blond boys burst through the door with an air of accomplishment. Clarence, 7, and Cal, 4, had just returned from feeding the pigs at the home of their neighbor Charlie, who lives down the street.
Sabey and Perkins, who were both English majors, met while working at Brigham Young University’s writing center. During a slow shift one morning, Sabey asked Perkins what she thought about the ethics of competition as an educational tool. He got her to take her first creative writing class, and on their first date, they watched the sunset and wrote poems. One time, while editing a nonfiction piece of Sabey’s, Perkins discovered that he had planted a proposal in the writing.
Both wanted to be English professors, but only Perkins got into graduate school — first a master’s degree at North Carolina State, then a PhD at Brandeis University in Boston, where she studied the Book of Job.
“I was really interested in the literature of suffering and the way people were making sense of it, especially as it connected to religiosity and secularism,” Perkins told me. What especially interested her was Job losing his children.
As part of her dissertation, she wanted to make a film exploring themes of suffering and loss and why God allows it to happen. Her initial idea involved a doctor alleviating suffering, but a month after she submitted her prospectus, their children were removed from their home in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“Our story got mapped onto the story of Job,” Sabey said.
As we talked, Perkins got her 15-month-old son, Henry, who had woken from a nap, and cradled him on the couch. The older children played, sporadically summoning a willing parent for help.
Sabey made his first documentary with his mother, who wanted to tell a story about mental health in America. Together, they went on to make films for parents whose children had attempted suicide or struggled with anorexia, with the goal of giving families tools to help their own children.
Steering away from the political polarization that often surrounds difficult national issues became one of the central principles of their production company, “Matters Media.”
Telling a story is ultimately an act of insisting that it matters, that it is worth remembering and passing on.
While filming “American Tragedy,” Sabey followed Sue Klebold, the mother of one of Columbine High School’s shooters, Dylan Klebold, as she tried to understand how the son she knew as a sweet boy could commit a horrific act of violence. While in Boston, the couple made a film about six women — three pro-choice and three pro-life — who met secretly in a basement for six years in the aftermath of shootings at two abortion clinics.
“I’d say most issue documentaries start out as either very Republican or very Democrat. It’s clear who they cater to,” Sabey told me. “We didn’t want that approach.”
Finding ways to tell stories of healing and reconciliation within tragic and often contentious events is how Sabey and Perkins made sense of life’s circumstances that might feel hopeless or absurd. It also gave them a way to process the disorienting separation they experienced themselves.
2 tragedies
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the topic for rebuilding the World Trade Center site became a source of fierce contention. Some wanted to rebuild the Twin Towers but make them even higher; others advocated for affordable housing. Some wanted to see an empty space to preserve the memory. Victims’ families, residents, business leaders — everyone was invested in solving the question: Who gets to decide what happens to a place where so many people died?
While traveling for the abortion dialogues documentary, Sabey found himself at a dinner table next to Carolyn Lukensmeyer, founder of AmericaSpeaks, a nonpartisan organization that pioneered large-scale public deliberation. Lukensmeyer told him a story about 9/11 that he had never heard before.
In 2002, Lukensmeyer helped transform the contentious debate into a civil conversation. She helped organize “Listening to the City,” a series of public meetings to give ordinary New Yorkers a voice in deciding how Lower Manhattan should be rebuilt. After an initial forum, the initiative culminated in a massive gathering of about 5,000 New Yorkers, who sat at hundreds of tables and deliberated six proposed plans for the site of the attack. The meeting didn’t settle the design, but helped persuade officials to go back to the drawing board.
To Sabey, this story of democracy in action felt timely, even 25 years later. “We need to know after 9/11 what it took, not just to rebuild, but how to rebuild together,” he told me. “And that democracy didn’t just work. People had to find ways to make it work.”
Lukensmeyer helped secure financial support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and others. To conduct the interviews, the couple, with Perkins pregnant, moved to Brooklyn for a month.
Trying to draw emotion from his subjects, Sabey was surprised by what ultimately moved them. “Almost everyone at the end of the interview cried about democracy today, friends not talking to each other due to political differences,” he said. “No one cried about 9/11.”
He found this illuminating. “It showed that while these are very different tragedies, they’re also both tragedies. There’s just the realization that what’s happening across the country is being experienced as a tragedy.”
Sabey and Perkins made the film in nine months to have it ready for streaming on Amazon Prime ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
As we talked, Perkins and Sabey took turns leaving the room to tend to their kids’ various requests.
At one point, a boy’s voice pierced the house as he came in from the yard: “I got stung by a wasp.”
We paused. Perkins rushed to the rescue.
“One second,” Sabey interjected calmly. “I’m going to go kill some wasps.”
The suffering of Job
On July 13, 2022, 3-month-old Cal was feverish, and Perkins took him into the emergency room at the pediatrician’s recommendation. The doctors ordered an X-ray to check for fluid in the baby’s lungs and discovered a healing rib fracture. A social worker questioned Perkins for hours, suspecting child abuse. Eventually, they identified a plausible cause: Several weeks prior, Sabey’s mother had been trying to put Cal into his car seat and unknowingly caused the injury.
The social workers visited the family’s home to ensure there was food and a safe place to sleep, and the DCF investigation found no evidence of abuse or wrongdoing.
Perkins remembers being “giddy with relief” when she was allowed to return home. The next day, around 1 a.m., police officers and DCF emergency response workers arrived at the family’s door. Speaking through the chained door, the officials, who said they didn’t have a warrant, told Sabey and Perkins they had come to take custody of their children.
“How would the boys eat?” Perkins immediately worried. Both boys had allergies, and she was exclusively nursing Cal. When police insisted they would not leave without the children, Sabey began filming the encounter.
“I remember sitting up on Clarence’s bed, picking him up and rubbing his back,” Perkins recalled. “I remember saying, ‘My boy, you get to go on a car ride and you’re going to meet new friends, you’re going to stay somewhere safe. And your mom and dad are going to find you as soon as we can.’”
She nursed Cal, packed a bag with diapers and pumped breast milk.
After Gabrielle Blair, author of the “Design Mom” blog and Sabey’s aunt, posted about the incident on then-Twitter, the story went viral. The children were eventually placed with Sabey’s parents, who came from Colorado. Perkins was granted visits to breastfeed Cal.
It would be four months before the couple regained full custody of their boys. They were also placed on the state’s child abuse registry, where they could remain until their youngest son turns 18.
In 2023, the couple filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Waltham, Waltham police officers, and Massachusetts Department of Children and Families officials over the warrantless removal of their boys. Sabey and Perkins allege that officials violated their constitutional rights by entering their home and taking their two sons without a warrant. They also sued the physician, who diagnosed Cal’s injury remotely without examining him or talking to the parents.
“For parents, the emotional and physical toll of having your crying children torn from your arms never goes away,” says the lawsuit filed on the family’s behalf by The Pacific Legal Foundation, which took the case pro bono.
In March, a federal judge ruled that the DCF workers who authorized the removal could potentially stand trial. The case now hinges on whether an appeals court will allow the government’s appeal to proceed. If the appeal is rejected, the case could go to trial as soon as next year. But if the appeals process continues, it could take years and potentially reach the Supreme Court.
“Clarence will be a teenager before all of this is done,” Perkins told me.
Over the years, the parents have shared the story of what happened to their family with journalists, attorneys and other parents in despair who contacted them.
To explain what transpired to the children, they wrote a children’s book.
“We wanted the narrative to be not about this horrible thing that happened to them, but that their family came together to take care of them,” Perkins said.
Their feature film, “Full of Days,” which Perkins directed as part of her dissertation project on suffering, told their own story, set on their Arbon farm, through the lens of the biblical story of Job. But the film ends differently than their life. The children go to live with another family and the couple has a new baby. Perkins wanted to imagine how even the worst possible outcome could be filled with grace.
Trust in democracy
Perkins and Sabey are more on guard now whenever strangers or people in positions of authority offer opinions about their children or their parenting style. They are more skeptical of the government and have more parental anxieties.
“Any time people are doing things with my kids that feel beyond my control or purview, my hackles are raised really easily,” Perkins said.
But the legal battle also instilled in them a faith in the democratic process and those who protect it. On the Fourth of July after filing the lawsuit, Perkins said she felt more patriotic than she ever had before.
“I think it did feel like we’re calling these people with power to come to the stand and to answer for what they did, and they have to come,” Perkins said. “And that’s amazing that it works.”
American democracy is sustained by more than the Constitution or formal government institutions, Sabey told me. It’s buttressed by a uniquely American democratic culture and a network of independent organizations like AmericaSpeaks or the Pacific Legal Foundation, with people willing to defend democratic principles and keep the government in check.
The family will likely not be in Arbon forever — it’s too isolating, and sometimes they wish they had more social interactions. But they’re not ready to leave. They’re editing a book of New Testament stories for children as part of their project called “For Little Saints.” They have already published children’s books based on the Book of Mormon, a Latter-day Saint scripture, and the Old Testament.
These books are a way of passing their faith on to their children. But it’s also an effort to bring back the focus to the stories and people in the scriptures without rushing to derive moral lessons, even when they are complicated or difficult to understand.
As with their other work, telling a story is ultimately an act of insisting that it matters, that it is worth remembering and passing on.
“The stories are only going to matter if somebody tells them,” Perkins said. “They matter as long as we allow them to matter to us.”