Twinsters (2015)
Imagine opening a video on YouTube and discovering someone who looked and sounded exactly like you. That’s what happened to Anais Bordier, a Korean-born French student attending school in the UK. The YouTube video she saw featured another Korean woman, American actress Samantha Futerman. After connecting through Facebook, the two girls learned that not only had they both been adopted, but shared the same birth date as well. Ultimately, a DNA test confirmed what everyone who had met the girls in person already knew: Anais and Samantha are identical twins.
Unfortunately, the concept of Twinsters is more interesting than the documentary itself. First, Samantha and members of her family fly to the UK to meet Anais and her family. Later the reverse happens, with Anais and members of her family visiting Samantha’s family in California. In a wacky Disney film this would lead to zany “fish out of water” antics, but in reality both Anais and Samantha are intelligent, well-spoken women who have no trouble navigating London or Venice Beach. Later, the two travel to Korea together to visit each of their original foster moms before attending a conference for adopted Koreans.
Few questions are presented throughout the film, and even fewer are answered. Other than the obvious stuff (“we both have the same fingernails!”) the film doesn’t get much into the nature vs. nurture questions we have about identical twins separated at birth. The twins wonder why they were separated and why their birth mother refuses to see them and denies she gave birth to twins, but all of these questions and more are met with merely a shrug. Instead, Anais and Samantha giggle a lot, hang on each other, and take selfies. By the end of the film, each of the girls are back home in their respective countries and we have no hint as to what their future relationship will be.
Great documentaries not only document an event, but present a narrative as well. Twinsters is primarily video footage of an extremely odd event that happened to two people. It fails to ask, or answer, any real questions. Perhaps fittingly, most of the film feels like a really well-shot YouTube video that simply sits back and says “Well, that happened.” While two separated twins discovering one-another through social media is an interesting occurrence, it is not enough to carry a 90 minute film. A more seasoned director could have done much more with the material.