TWINSTERS Trailer

Lately, I’ve been looking for something lacking in blood and guts to review, and this trailer meets all of my needs. It’s something sweet, a nice story of two souls finding each other without sex or romance involved. Best of all, it’s real or at least marginally real since there tends to always be fluff in this type of film in order to bait people. If it’s at least 80% “real,” then that should be sufficient. This is the trailer for the documentary film Twinsters.

At the helm leading this production are directors Ryan Miyamoto and Samantha Futerman. Samantha is also the main subject alongside her body double, Anaïs Bordier. The tale told comes out of Facebook of all places, when Anaïs finds Sam in a YouTube video. She subsequently contacts her through social media and thus begins the journey to find out if they’re of the same zygote, since they’re both adopted.

I want to get all my negative thoughts out first. Twinsters is not a great name, but it’s still better than many of Hollywood’s choices in movie titles. Samantha is an American actor in Los Angeles, so I’m wary of her duty to promote herself. More power to her, but I’m here to enjoy a story that I’m hoping is more true than not. I have to observe the scenes and decide if they exist for aesthetic value or if they actually move the story along. In the trailer, there are aesthetic shots of trains and sped up shots of the city. I understand why they need to be there but I really just want to get caught up with the exhilaration of meeting your long lost twin sister.

Now for the positive: it’s nice. There is some baiting here, and the possibility exists that the two girls may not be related. Scenes of tears and moments of sincere vulnerability between the two tug at your heart strings. The moments I sought were the giddy moments of anticipation and discovery. One scene had Samantha skipping at the airport and another doing cutesy poses with Anaïs. Just imagine that, by dumb luck, you find the only other person in the world who can understand you. That’s something special and totally worth documentation.

In all honesty, the beauty of documentaries are that they vary so widely from subject to subject. This one is appealing for the sincerity of meeting someone who is simultaneously a stranger and also family at the same time. In my mind, even if it turns out badly, they’ve built a foundation of friendship that’s deep and probably long-lasting. It may sound sappy, but you need to be vulnerable to that sometimes. You need to remind yourself that you’re human and it’s not a bad thing to hope for and expect the best of a situation.

Twinsters comes out in 2015 and has already been screened by the South by Southwest Film Festival. No hard dates yet.

What do you think of the trailer? Do you think Twinsters will be worth seeing? 

(top image source: Small Package Films)