Documentary on triplets is one of a kind Astonishing true story follows siblings separated at birth By: Randall King  Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018

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This article was published 01/08/2018 (2352 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Many of us go through life occasionally pondering the possibility: what if there was someone out there who looked exactly like me?

This documentary takes that random speculation and tells an astonishing true story, which begins with a 19-year-old kid named Robert Shafran arriving at a community college in New York state only to be mystified as to why so many people seem to recognize him as they are welcoming him “back” with hugs and kisses and slaps on the back.

He soon discovers he apparently has an exact doppelganger. More interestingly, he and Eddy, who attended that same college the previous year, were born on the same day.

That evening, a friend of Eddy’s arranges a meeting between the two, and Robert Shafran and Eddy Galland realize they were apparently identical twins separated when they were adopted.

It gets stranger. The news services pick up on the story, and a third teen — David Kellman — recognized his own face in the accompanying photograph.

So… three triplets, all raised by three different Jewish families through the services of an esteemed New York adoption agency.

Another coincidence: each of the three young men had an older adopted sister.

Back in 1980, their story was the stuff of daytime TV talk shows such as Donahue. And the story was generally considered a good-news kind of feature in which the public was all invited to marvel at how similar the three guys were, despite divergent backgrounds. They smoked the same brand of cigarettes, they sat the same, they talked the same and they instantly bonded as soon as they laid eyes on each other.

They happily celebrated their reunion by living together, partying together and ultimately going into business together on a successful SoHo restaurant called Triplets.

But as their fraternal adventure continued, cracks appeared in the instant family unit, not the least of which was the fact that questions remained unanswered from their adoptive parents on why the triplets had to be separated at all.

The answers are surprising, and for the sake of avoiding spoilers, we won’t delve into it, except to say the true story rivals fiction — say, The Truman Show — in its portrayal of power abused for the sake of an inquiry into human nature.

Director Tim Wardle cleverly blends archival footage with contemporary interviews to fashion a compelling mystery story.

But, in an effort to avoid exploitation, the mystery never supercedes the human dimension to the story, or the high cost exacted on the brothers and their families.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
Reporter

In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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