Social networks have marked a before and after in the way we relate to others. From keeping up with the lives of our loved ones to unusual cases of people who would never have met if they didn’t have an online profile.
This is a very special case, since it is about two twins, Anaïs and Samantha, who would never have met if they were not so active on social networks.
Both were born in South Korea on November 19, 1987, but were separated at birth and life took them very different paths. They had been given up for adoption, but they did not know that they each had a twin sister identical to them.
Anaïs is a French fashion designer living in London and Samantha is an actress living in Los Angeles. Fate brought them together in the most unexpected way.
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A friend of Anaïs found a girl identical to her in a YouTube video and shared it. This girl was, of course, Samantha. At first she did not know her name, but with the help of another friend she found out that her name was Samantha Futerman and she had participated in 21 & Over.
Armed with this information, Anaïs searched through Samantha’s profiles until she discovered that she was born on the same day as her. She finally plucked up the courage to contact her and confirmed that all her suspicions were true: they were sisters and neither of them knew it.
They communicated via Facebook, Skype video calls, and even exchanged documentation to make sure it was true, but it always had been, and neither could help but feel a special connection to the other. It was at this moment that Samantha’s film instincts kicked in and she decided to tell her story in a documentary.
This unusual story was told in the documentary Twinsters, which raised $82,400 with a Kickstarter campaign. It premiered in early 2015 at the SXSW Film Festival and then hit Los Angeles and 35 other cities in July.
Stories like this make us wonder, how many twins are there in the world who have never met, and perhaps never will?
We can be a little calmer to think that, with the help of social networks, everyone has the same opportunities to reunite with their family, like Samantha and Anaïs.