PARK CITY, Utah - A Sundance movie has taken aim at a prominent East Coast charity, putting the group on the defensive over allegations of stealth experiments on humans.
The documentary, "Three Identical Strangers," says the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services has not made amends for a defunct adoption agency under its auspices that separated identical siblings and conducted a secret study on them in the 1960s and 1970s.
The subjects of the film have demanded the release of records from the study, an apology and even compensation, all of which they say have not been offered.
"It was cruel; it was wrong," David Kellman, a triplet separated at birth from his brothers Bobby Shafran and Eddie Galland, told The Washington Post at the festival this week.
Added Shafran, sitting next to him. "I think the first thing [the Jewish Board] should have done once they became aware of this movie is reunite any twins still surviving and advise those who've been deceased, just so they can know who they are," Shafran said. "And [the board] still never admitted what they did, never said 'I'm sorry,' let alone offered any recompense."
As the country's most prominent film festival winds down Sunday, it leaves behind a number of films that will make a lasting cultural impression. But one of the movies that might have the biggest news impact is the British director Timothy Wardle's "Strangers," which on Saturday night won a special jury prize for storytelling.
The documentary, which had its final showing at the festival this weekend, tells the story of New York triplets born in 1961 and placed with three local families by the now-defunct Louise Wise Agency, which was financed and came under the umbrella of the Jewish Board, also in New York.
The boys never knew of one another's existence until they were 19, when a coincidence at a college in rural Sullivan County reunited two of them, Galland and Shafran. Kellman was reconnected with them soon after when he and his adoptive mother saw news coverage and realized that he was their identical sibling.
"It was the first day of many days in the Twilight Zone," Kellman said.
"I know a lot of people feel different or strange," Shafran said. "But for me it was like I had something missing all my life. And when I finally got to school that day [at 19], it was like I was given the instruction manual."
The three would dine out on the events, making appearances on "The Phil Donahue Show" and in the Madonna movie "Desperately Seeking Susan." They would eventually even open a restaurant together named Triplets.
But the story would take a more sinister turn. It turns out that the brothers weren't split up because the adoption agency wanted to ensure that more families received babies, as representatives at Louise Wise first suggested to the parents after the boys' reunion.
Instead, they were part of a secret study conducted by the Austrian-born psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer. As part of Neubauer's research, the triplets, along with as many as a dozen more sets of identical siblings, were surreptitiously split up and placed with families of different socioeconomic backgrounds, then raised separately so that Neubauer's team could study the effects of nature and nurture. No one told the adoptive parents that their children had identical siblings.
Researchers over the following years were then regularly sent to adopted children's homes to test and observe the children, then report back to the psychoanalyst, never revealing to their parents the true purpose of their visit or that their child's identical sibling was living just a few miles away.
Learning as adults what had happened to them, the brothers said, shook them; Shafran in the movie compares it to the Nazis' social experiments.
The long-term toll the separation took on all three was potentially deep, they said. Galland would commit suicide in the 1990s, a possible victim of a hereditary mental illness the two other brothers say was withheld from them.
Although many of the people involved with Louise Wise are long gone, Shafran and Kellman allege that there haven't been nearly enough efforts made by the Jewish Board's current administration to take responsibility for the organization's history.
"It's not like it happened a long time ago - it happened in modern times," Kellman said.
"And it's not like we didn't have great parents - we did," Shafran said when told that if all three were placed together, two of them would have had different parents. "But they can't play God and they did. And for that they should do something," he said, underscoring that the brothers hoped for an apology and monetary compensation.
The Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, commonly known as the Jewish Board, employs more than 3,000 people and provides services in areas including mental health, early childhood development and domestic violence. The nonprofit organization is nearly 150 years old, and as of 2014 had a budget in excess of $200 million.
Louise Wise ceased operations in 2004 and its records were transferred to a New York resource center known as Spence-Chapin. But Neubauer's sealed study, which has long been housed at Yale University, was not released, and requests over the years by its subjects to unseal it were rebuffed.
After the completion of the film, Wardle said, some of the thousands of pages of the study were made public but they were heavily redacted.
"It really wasn't very useful," Wardle said. "You didn't really learn that much from them about what was happening."
While Kellman and Shafran say the release of the full study won't undo the pain of growing up separately - the former in a working-class environment and the latter in an upper-middle-class home - at least it will reveal what their struggle was for.
"It would help us to know what came out of it," Kellman said. "It would help us if we knew the study may have even done some good." Neubauer died in 2008.
The Jewish Board did not participate in the movie, fearing interview quotes would be taken out of context, according to a person familiar with the group's plans who was not authorized to speak publicly on its behalf.
The group has since worried about the negative perceptions because of the film and began exploring the possibility of hiring a crisis public relations firm to handle fallout. A message to the organization's in-house media representative was not immediately returned Sunday.
Shafran and Kellman are not the only people to speak out about the actions of Louise Wise. Identical twins raised separately, Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein also each learned of the other's existence as adults and wrote a book together.
The acclaimed journalist Lawrence Wright included material about the incidents in his book "Twins." All three appear in the film.
It wasn't easy to get the movie made. Wardle alluded to several television-film attempts that were made before, and said he believed they didn't move forward because of legal pressure. He and his producers were worried but did not face such pressure, he said.
"Strangers," which was partly financed by CNN, will air on the network this year. The "I, Tonya" distributor Neon purchased theatrical rights at Sundance, ensuring the story will continue to gain exposure.
The filmmakers and subjects say they hope the attention will move the board to try to heal the rift caused by the study.
"They can't give us back our childhoods but they can find ways to show us they're sorry," Kellman said.
At a Sundance screening, Wardle turned to the brothers sympathetically. "You still haven't gotten the answers you want," he said. "You still don't have the truth."
- The Washington Post.
