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Documentary ‘Twinsters’ is a feel-good family story

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Samantha Futerman and Anais Bordier were unknowingly separated at birth and adopted by different families.

Three and a half stars

Twinsters Directed by Samantha Futerman and Ryan Miyamoto. Not rated. Opens Friday.

The cute, feel-good documentary Twinsters offers a nice contrast to movies like Catfish and the recent A Gay Girl in Damascus, in which con artists use the Internet to forge fraudulent connections with vulnerable people. In Twinsters, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Skype are all heroes, allowing Korean-born identical twins Samantha Futerman, an actress living in LA, and Anais Bordier, a French fashion student living in London, to discover each other after having been unknowingly separated at birth and adopted by different families. Their enthusiasm for the unexpected reunion is infectious, and Futerman and her co-director Ryan Miyamoto bring a slick, relatable style (including simple but effective graphics and animation) to their film about the sisterly bond.

Thanks to her showbiz connections, Futerman started documenting the sisters’ correspondence from the very beginning, and the movie has the thrill of discovery as Futerman and Bordier take each new step in their relationship. The movie’s final third touches on some serious issues about Western adoptions of Korean babies, but it never loses sight of the personal story of these bubbly, optimistic women, a genuinely life-affirming journey that illustrates the essential power of family, in whatever form it takes.

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