Look Who it Was Random video

Three Identical Strangers - Nadia Sawalha & Family Movie Review (SPOILERS)

3,863 views · Published 29 November 2018 · 15:12 · Indexed 27 September 2026

Channel: The Sawalha-Adderleys ... ONLY CONNECT! · 2018 · Entertainment

Watch on YouTube

The TRAILER for this SHOCK DOC absolutely WOWED and FLOORED all of us!! So what did WE think?!?!

A feel good news story from Reagan’s America becomes something much darker and more complex in this documentary from British film-maker Tim Wardle, who has built on the work of New Yorker investigative journalist Laurence Wright.

In 1980, three triplets, given up individually for adoption to different families 18 years before, were accidentally and ecstatically reunited by an extraordinary quirk of fate. It is as gripping as a first-contact sci-fi. They had had no idea of each other’s existence, and neither had their adoptive families.

David Kellman, Eddy Galland and Bobby Shafran became huge media stars: good-looking, smart, personable Jewish American boys who saw no reason not to enjoy the spotlight. They were on every TV show and newsstand and, for a Warholian 15 minutes, became America’s darlings. But then their adoptive parents angrily asked why they had been split up like this, robbed of much of their own existence.

After a tense confrontation with the evasive officials of the adoption agency, one adoptive parent returned to the conference room to find these people drinking champagne, like the sinister people in an Ira Levin story. The awful truth is that the boys were separated deliberately, as were many other sets of adoptive twins (though no other adoptive triplets that we know about) at the behest of distinguished psychologist Peter B Neubauer, who had instituted a secret research project to get to the bottom of the nature-versus-nurture debate.

His findings were never published and the identities of the “private Washington charities” who bankrolled this creepy scheme remain a mystery. Why did Neubauer suppress his own work? Was it because, as a Swiss-born refugee from the Nazis himself, he became increasingly worried about how experimentation on Jewish triplets was going to look? Or was it that he worried that the results were slanted and valueless?

Who knows? But Wardle tells a compelling story of the three happy boys who became three unhappy men, their faces shining with a kind of ecstasy in their youth, then muted with sadness and bewilderment in middle age.

Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film directed by Tim Wardle and starring Edward Galland, David Kellman and Robert Shafran. It examines a set of American triplets who were adopted as six-month-old infants by separate families, unaware that each child had brothers. The separations were done as part of an undisclosed scientific "nature versus nurture" twin study, to track the development of genetically identical siblings raised in differing circumstances. Combining archival footage, re-enacted scenes, and present-day interviews, the documentary reveals how the brothers discovered one another at age 19 and thereafter sought to understand the circumstances of their separation.

The film premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling.

More from this channel