Separating children for nefarious reasons has happened before.
In ‘Three Identical Strangers,’ A Saga About Triplets Grows More Twisted By The Minute
About 20 minutes into “Three Identical Strangers,” you might ask yourself where this documentary could possibly be headed. Shocked by the saga’s immediate crescendo, you’ll ask yourself the same question 20 minutes later, and again 20 minutes after that, and probably a few more times throughout the remainder of its 96-minute runtime.
There’s no soft build here. The movie opens in medias res, as pure happenstance reunites the titular 19-year-old identical triplets for the first time since they were separated at birth and adopted by three different families. Two of the brothers (Eddy Galland and Robert Shafran) connected after classmates mistook one for the other at a small New York community college that they both attended; the third (David Kellman) saw the news of their reunion in the New York Post, recognizing his own face twice over and subsequently tracking them down.
Born on Long Island in 1961, none knew the others existed until this seemingly blissful, life-altering discovery flowered in tandem with their nascent adulthood. “It was a miracle,” Kellman’s aunt by adoption tells the camera, recalling the first time all three were in the same room.
“Once we got together, there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life, and it lasted a really long time,” Shafran says.
Their reunion became a mini-phenomenon in the media throughout the 1980s, most notably with a “Phil Donahue Show” episode that juxtaposed the brothers’ uncanny alikeness ― similar interests, indistinguishable mannerisms ― with the fact that they were raised in different households and different cities. At its core, this was the perennial nature-versus-nurture debate, illuminated. Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright revisited the matter as part of his 1999 book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are, by which point certain damning details about the triplets’ separation had emerged.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/three-identical-strangers-documentary_us_5b2d165ee4b00295f15c1b18
