It begins in 1980, when a new student at an upstate college is greeted by returning students. How was your summer? Good to see you! He thinks it's weird until one guy stares at him. "Were you adopted? What's your birthday?" It turns out he has an unknown identical twin. When the story hits the newspaper another one pops up. They bond. Everything is wonderful, except that each set of parents is outraged. Why weren't they told? They would have adopted all three!
At this point I was starting to lose interest, as it looked like it was turning into a story about lawsuits and people declaring what they would have done versus a well-meaning charity's understandable policy -- people may want to adopt a baby, but who needs the expense and tsuris of three? However, the story took a turn with a interview with an investigative reporter and a report of identical twins being deliberately separated for cold-blooded study... and by the end the trail had led to a powerful Jewish charity and an archive in Yale that's sealed for almost half a century more.
I'm a great fan of the ability of movies to tell a story, but I have rarely seen a documentary that told such a disturbing, heart-breaking factual story. I thought myself inured to the cruelty of people, but I left the theater asking how could these people, of all people, have thought to have done these things? It's also an investigation into the character of three people, the question of nature versus nurture, and the issue of free will. Quite simply, it's one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.
At this point I was starting to lose interest, as it looked like it was turning into a story about lawsuits and people declaring what they would have done versus a well-meaning charity's understandable policy -- people may want to adopt a baby, but who needs the expense and tsuris of three? However, the story took a turn with a interview with an investigative reporter and a report of identical twins being deliberately separated for cold-blooded study... and by the end the trail had led to a powerful Jewish charity and an archive in Yale that's sealed for almost half a century more.
I'm a great fan of the ability of movies to tell a story, but I have rarely seen a documentary that told such a disturbing, heart-breaking factual story. I thought myself inured to the cruelty of people, but I left the theater asking how could these people, of all people, have thought to have done these things? It's also an investigation into the character of three people, the question of nature versus nurture, and the issue of free will. Quite simply, it's one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.