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"Three Identical Strangers" opens on Friday, June 29, as chronicled in multiple news reports, including this one.
When 19-year-old Robert Shafran drove from his home in Scarsdale to the Catskills for his first day at Sullivan Community College in 1980, he was shocked to find that everyone already knew and adored him, according to this story in the New York Post.
"Welcome back," SUNY Sullivan classmates reportedly proclaimed.
A fellow student then asked if Shafran was adopted, telling him he had a twin.
The student was a friend of Edward Galland, who dropped out of the community college the year before. He knew Galland had been adopted, so he called him: Shafran was shocked to hear a voice just like his on the phone and couldn’t wait to meet his newfound brother.
Shafran and the student drove to Long Island the same day to meet Galland, who lived with adoptive parents. Shafran saw his own face staring back at him: “It was like everything faded away, and it was just me and Eddy," he says in the documentary.
A few months later, Queens College student David Kellman saw a news story about the reunited twins and recognized his own face in the photos.
“Three Identical Strangers” chronicles an unbelievable reunion of siblings separated near birth: Their journey is even more shocking once they discover they were part of a secret, decades-long psychological experiment that controlled their fate.
The three boys were born to a teenage girl on July 12, 1961, at Hillside Hospital in Queens.
Split up at six months old by a now-defunct Manhattan adoption agency, the triplets were raised within 100 miles of one another. None of the new parents were told their adopted boy had brothers. For the first 10 years of their lives, the siblings each were visited by research assistants led by a child psychologist who worked closely with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
The prominent psychologist's study of "nature versus nurture," first revealed by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, involved separating an unknown number of twins and triplets at birth and placing them with families of varied economic backgrounds.
The triplets brothers were placed with families who were upper middle class (Shafran), middle class (Galland) and working class (Kellman).
Additional news coverage of the amazing documentary can be read here as well as by clicking here.
A trailer for the new film, which is being screened at the Sundance Film Festival, can be viewed by clicking here.
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