Two newborns. One Korean hospital bassinet. Two planes, in opposite directions. Twenty-five years before they would ever see each other's faces.
November 19, 1987 — Busan, South Korea. Two identical baby girls are born in a hospital on the city's south side. Within a few months, they are separated. One is adopted by a French couple and grows up in a small apartment in Paris. The other is adopted by a Jewish family in Verona, New Jersey, and grows up an hour from Manhattan. Neither family is told the baby has a twin. Neither baby knows.
February 21, 2013 — London. A 25-year-old French fashion student named Anaïs Bordier is sitting on her bed, scrolling through Facebook, when her friend Kelsang sends her a YouTube link. "Tell me this isn't you." She clicks. She watches twenty-three seconds of an American comedy short. She sees her own face speaking English with an American accent. This is the full true story of what happened next.
November 19, 1987: Busan, South Korea
If you were in Busan on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1987, you were in a city that did not yet realize it was about to be famous. The Olympic Games were nine months away. The city was scrubbing itself. New highways were being poured. The hills around the harbor were full of construction cranes, and the air had that early-winter, near-the-sea Korean smell that anyone who has ever spent a November in Busan will recognize — wet pine, kimchi fermenting on apartment balconies, diesel from the fishing boats coming in at dusk.
On the south side of the city, in a private maternity hospital whose name has since been changed three times, a young woman gave birth to two identical daughters.
That is where the published record goes quiet, because in 1987 Korea, the privacy of an unmarried birth mother was protected with the kind of bureaucratic firmness that makes records, decades later, almost impossible to recover. What we know for certain — what the documents in the Holt International adoption archive in Seoul will confirm — is that within a few months, both baby girls had been placed for international adoption.
One Plane to Paris. Another Plane to New York.
The first baby flew to Charles de Gaulle Airport with a Korean attendant. She was met by a French couple from the 11th arrondissement who had been waiting for almost three years. They named her Anaïs.
The second baby flew to JFK with a different attendant. She was met by a New Jersey family from a leafy suburb called Verona, an hour west of Manhattan, who had a five-year-old son and had been waiting almost as long. They named her Samantha.
Neither family was told that the baby they were taking home had a twin. The adoption agency files, as Samantha and Anaïs would discover a quarter-century later, contained no mention of it. This was not, in retrospect, an accident. It was — by the best forensic guess of the people who eventually looked into it — a quiet, common decision in 1987 Korean adoption agencies to place identical-twin infants separately, on the theory that two infants together were harder to find homes for than two singletons.
Whether that theory was ever correct is a different question. It was the operating assumption.
" She was born the exact same day, the exact same month, and the exact same year. That's when I knew this was not a coincidence. — Anaïs Bordier, to ABC News, May 2013
The Era of 200,000 Korean Adoptees
To understand what happened to Anaïs and Samantha, you have to understand the larger thing they were quietly born into.
Between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the year 2000, an estimated 200,000 South Korean children were placed for international adoption. The number is staggering when you sit with it. It is more than the entire population of Salt Lake City. It is roughly the size of every Korean adoption to the rest of the world combined, in fact — Korea was, for nearly fifty years, the single largest source country of international adoption in human history.
The peak years were the late 1970s through the early 1990s. In 1987 alone — the year Anaïs and Samantha were born — roughly 8,800 Korean babies were placed for international adoption, the vast majority of them in the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
Why So Many Babies, Why So Far From Home
The reasons were tangled. Post-war Korea was poor. Stigma against single mothers was intense — culturally, legally, economically. Adoption agencies in the West, particularly in the United States, had developed efficient pipelines through Korean partner agencies like Holt International, founded in 1956 by an Oregon couple named Harry and Bertha Holt who had taken in eight mixed-race Korean War orphans and decided to make a career of it.
By the time Anaïs and Samantha were placed in late 1987, the system was efficient, well-funded, and entirely set up to send Korean babies to Western families. The system was, in some places, also quietly cutting corners.
Such as, for example, not always mentioning twins.
a small bureaucratic detail
Years later, after the reunion, after the DNA tests, after the documentary and the book tour, Anaïs and Samantha would write to Holt Korea and to the other agencies that had handled their adoptions and ask, politely, for any additional records. The answer they received, repeatedly and from multiple sources, was a version of "the records have been lost, or were never created, or are no longer accessible." To this day, the two of them do not know the name of their birth mother. They do not know who carried them. They do not know whether she ever knew there were two. They do know, from photographs they obtained much later, that for the first three months of their lives they were both cared for by Korean foster mothers — separately, in separate homes, in different parts of Busan.
Growing Up in Paris: The Bordier Apartment
The apartment Anaïs Bordier grew up in was on the fourth floor of an early-1900s building in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a fifteen-minute walk from the Bastille. Her parents were what the French gently call cultured — her father was an engineer, her mother an art-history teacher at a private school in the Marais. They were not a family with a lot of money, but they were a family with a lot of bookshelves.
A Daughter of the 11th Arrondissement
Anaïs grew up speaking French at home, English at school, and a small amount of Korean — perhaps fifty words, mostly nouns for food — that her mother had taught herself out of a paperback in the late 1980s. The family ate dinner at eight in the evening, watched the news at eight-thirty, and went to the Sunday market on the Rue de la Roquette nearly every weekend of Anaïs's childhood.
She was, by every standard adult-eyewitness account, a quiet, slightly serious, very observant little girl. She liked drawing. She liked pretending the back of the family Renault was a fashion atelier. By age eleven, she was sketching dresses in the margins of her math homework. By age fifteen, she was teaching herself pattern-cutting from a borrowed library book.
The French Education, the Slight Korean Eyes
What Anaïs did not grow up with was anybody who looked like her. Her parents were both white, both French, both from old Parisian families. Her primary school was almost entirely French. The first time she saw another Korean adoptee was in a documentary on television when she was approximately twelve, and she remembers, very clearly, the small lurch in her chest when the woman in the film smiled.
It was not — as she would later carefully explain in interviews — that her childhood was unhappy. She loved her parents. She loved Paris. She loved her quiet, ordered, perfumed little French life. It was simply that there was a particular kind of silence in her, in the place where she might once have known the face of another person who looked like her, and she did not know what that silence was.
She enrolled, at age 22, at the prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school in London. She moved to a small flat in north London. She began studying for what would become her postgraduate degree in fashion design.
Growing Up in Verona, New Jersey: The Futerman House
Verona, New Jersey, is the kind of small American suburb that does not appear in many films because nothing terribly dramatic ever happens there. It is approximately fourteen square miles. It has good public schools, a small downtown with a pizza place and an ice-cream shop and a hardware store, and almost exactly nine thousand families, most of whom have lived there for at least one generation.
The Futerman family — Jay, an attorney, Judy, a homemaker, and their five-year-old biological son Andrew — lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in the heart of town. They had been waiting almost three years to adopt a baby girl from Korea. When the call came that their daughter was on her way, Judy spent the next four days repainting the small bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall a soft yellow.
A Suburban American Girlhood
Samantha — Sam, to almost everybody who has ever known her — grew up the way American suburban girls in the 1990s grew up. She played soccer. She joined the chorus. She watched a lot of Disney movies and a lot of episodes of "Full House" and quietly, from a very early age, decided she was going to be an actress when she grew up. Her older brother Andrew, who is also adopted from Korea but is not biologically related to her, was four years older and what older brothers tend to be — sometimes wonderful, sometimes irritating, occasionally both within a single afternoon.
The Stage at Boston University
Sam went to Boston University's College of Fine Arts in 2005. She graduated, with a BFA in acting, in 2009. She moved, the following month, to Los Angeles. She got a small apartment in Studio City with two roommates. She worked two waitressing jobs and went to auditions five days a week. She did, for almost three years, the thing that 22-year-old aspiring actresses from New Jersey have done for approximately a hundred years: she tried very hard, with very little money, to break through.
And then, slowly, things started to happen. She booked a guest spot on a network medical drama. She booked a national commercial. She started a YouTube channel with two friends. And then, in the autumn of 2012, she landed the role of "Joy" in a Miles Teller / Skylar Astin college comedy called "21 & Over". The film was scheduled to premiere in Los Angeles on the evening of February 21, 2013.
Two days before that premiere, on a Tuesday afternoon, a French fashion student in London opened her laptop.
Two Parallel Lives, 1987 to 2013
February 21, 2013: The Tuesday That Changed Everything
On the Tuesday afternoon of February 19, 2013 — two days before Samantha's 21 & Over premiere in Hollywood — Anaïs Bordier was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her small north-London flat, eating a small bowl of fromage blanc with honey, scrolling through Facebook in the dim grey light of a London winter afternoon.
Her phone buzzed. It was a Facebook message from her friend Kelsang Karphel, a fellow design student who knew Anaïs's whole story — the Korean adoption, the gentle perpetual quiet about it. Kelsang had attached a link to a YouTube comedy short featuring a young American actress whose face, in Kelsang's words, "is, like, completely your face."
The message was a single line:
Tell me this isn't you.
Anaïs clicked.
Twenty-Three Seconds of YouTube
The video was a short comedy sketch. It was twenty-three seconds long. In it, a young woman with a long dark ponytail, exactly Anaïs's build, smiled at the camera and said something funny in English with a very specifically American accent.
The first thing Anaïs noticed was the mouth. It was her own mouth. The same small slight crookedness when she smiled — the way the upper lip pulled just very slightly to the left, a feature she had spent twenty-five years observing in mirrors and had assumed, without ever quite questioning it, was just her.
The second thing she noticed was the eyebrows. The exact same eyebrows. Including the small asymmetry — the left a fraction higher than the right — that her mother in Paris had teased her about her entire childhood.
The third thing she noticed was a small mole on the right side of the woman's neck. She had the same mole, on the same side, in the same exact position.
Anaïs Bordier did not move from her bed for approximately the next forty minutes. She watched the twenty-three-second clip eleven times.
Light Google Stalking
The actress's name, according to the YouTube channel description, was Samantha Futerman. A quick Google search — what Anaïs would later describe to ABC News as "light Google stalking" — turned up Samantha's IMDb page, her Wikipedia stub, her Twitter, and her recent press for an upcoming film called 21 & Over, premiering in Los Angeles in two days.
It also turned up something else. Something that made Anaïs put down her bowl of fromage blanc and just sit there, very quietly, for the next ten or fifteen minutes:
Samantha Futerman was born on November 19, 1987.
So was Anaïs Bordier.
The Facebook Message She Almost Did Not Send
Anaïs spent forty-eight hours thinking about whether to send a message. She talked to Kelsang. She talked to her boyfriend at the time. She talked, late on the Wednesday night, to her mother in Paris on the phone — a long, slow conversation in French, her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, going "oh, my love" at increasingly small intervals.
"I was terrified," Anaïs later told Boston University's alumni magazine, "of being wrong. Of looking foolish to a stranger. Of finding out she was just somebody who happened to look like me. Of finding out it wasn't real."
On the early afternoon of Thursday, February 21, 2013 — twelve hours before Samantha would walk a small red carpet at the Westwood Village Theatre in Los Angeles for the premiere of 21 & Over — Anaïs sat down at her laptop, opened Facebook, and typed a careful, polite, French-cadenced English message.
She sent it.
And then, like a person who has thrown a lit match into a dry forest and now has nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait, she closed the laptop and went to make tea.
Saturday Morning, Los Angeles: Samantha Opens Her Facebook
It was Saturday morning, February 23, 2013, around 9:30 in the morning Pacific time. Samantha Futerman had been at her own movie premiere two nights earlier, had spent the next day with her family, and had gotten home to her small Studio City apartment late on Friday night, exhausted, and gone immediately to bed.
She woke up around eight. She made coffee. She opened her laptop. She had — like every actress in LA who has just been in a small film — roughly 600 unread Facebook messages, most of them from strangers, most of them either flattering or weird.
She started scrolling through them. She found Anaïs Bordier's message somewhere around the four-hundredth one. She read it once. She read it again. She read it a third time.
And then, sitting alone in her kitchen in Studio City at 9:34 in the morning, in a pair of pajamas she had not changed out of, Samantha Futerman — actress, 25 years old, recently single, very tired — said, out loud, to no one, in the empty apartment:
"…oh."
The Reply She Almost Didn't Send Either
Sam, being a working actress, was reasonably cautious. She forwarded the message to her brother Andrew. She forwarded it to her best friend. She forwarded it to her parents in New Jersey. The general consensus, from all parties consulted within roughly twenty minutes, was: "Sam, that is very probably your sister."
By eleven that morning, Pacific time, she had replied.
By noon, the two women were exchanging photographs of themselves as babies.
By that evening, they were arranging their first Skype call.
The First Skype Call
It happened on the evening of Sunday, February 24, 2013 — five o'clock in the afternoon in London, nine in the morning in Los Angeles. Anaïs sat at her small desk in her London flat. Samantha sat on the couch in her Studio City apartment, in a Boston University hoodie, with her brother Andrew and her best friend hovering just out of frame for moral support.
The Three Seconds Before Either of Them Spoke
The Skype call connected with the same small electronic chime that all Skype calls began with in 2013. The video loaded. Anaïs's window appeared. Samantha's window appeared. Each of them, on her own continent, saw her own face on a screen, doubled.
For approximately three seconds, neither of them said anything.
And then — at almost exactly the same moment — both of them started crying.
Twenty-Five Years of Voices, Almost Identical
The voices were the eerie part. They had the same pitch. The same tendency to laugh in the middle of sentences. The same small habit of saying "um" in a slightly singing way. The same lateral lisp on the letter s. Anaïs had a French accent. Samantha had a New Jersey one. But underneath the accents, in the small architecture of how the voice actually worked — pace, breath, pitch, rhythm — the two of them sounded like the same person speaking in two different languages.
The call lasted close to four hours.
They covered: their adoption stories, what they remembered of their childhoods, their favorite foods, their boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, their mothers in Paris and Verona, their fathers, their brothers, their pets, their recurring dreams. Anaïs reported a dream she had had since childhood about being held by someone whose face she could not see. Samantha got very quiet on the other end of the call and said she had had a version of the same dream since she was approximately five.
Samantha, who had been working with cameras for several years, did something extraordinarily smart that evening. She had started recording the call, with Anaïs's permission, about ten minutes in.
It is the first of the 23,000 clips that would, two years later, become the documentary Twinsters.
By the Numbers
May 2013: The Heathrow Arrival Gate
The DNA tests arrived in the mail in late March 2013. Anaïs spit into a small plastic tube in London. Samantha spit into an identical one in Los Angeles. They each mailed the tubes back to a lab in Houston, Texas. The results came back, four weeks later, with the kind of clinical finality you would expect from a Texas DNA lab: 99.99% probability of identical twins.
Anaïs read the email at her kitchen table in London. She read it once. She read it again. She closed her laptop and walked, very slowly, into her bedroom, lay down on her bed, and cried for almost twenty minutes — the soft kind of crying that you do when something good has happened that you have been waiting your whole life for, that you are not yet ready to believe.
A Plane Ticket From LAX to Heathrow
They picked May. Samantha booked a flight on a Tuesday — an eleven-hour direct, LAX to Heathrow. Her brother Andrew came with her, partly for moral support and partly because Andrew is the kind of older brother who would want to be there for the first time his little sister hugged a person who was, biologically, also his little sister.
Anaïs took the underground from her flat in north London out to Heathrow Terminal 5. She got there an hour early. She bought a pretzel. She did not eat the pretzel.
The plane landed at 11:42 in the morning local time.
The Three Seconds Before They Touched
Samantha came up the long sloped corridor that empties out of the international arrivals area at Terminal 5 with her brother behind her, dragging two enormous suitcases. She turned the corner. She saw Anaïs. Anaïs saw her.
For three seconds, neither of them moved.
Then they were holding each other in the middle of an airport arrivals hall, sobbing so hard the security guards twenty feet away exchanged glances and looked away, and Andrew Futerman — who is, in his own description, "not a crier" — quietly set down his suitcases and started crying too.
Late 2013: Going Back to Where It Started
They went, together, to Busan.
It was their first trip back to Korea since they had been newborns. They flew in November 2013, almost exactly twenty-six years to the day after the morning they had both been born. They went together — to the hospital, to the adoption agency offices, to the small districts of the city where each of them had spent her first three months in the care of a Korean foster mother.
Meeting the Foster Mothers
This is the part of the story that, in the documentary Twinsters, makes audiences cry harder than any other moment. Holt Korea was able to locate both of the foster mothers who had cared for Anaïs and Samantha as infants in late 1987 and early 1988.
Anaïs's foster mother was a woman in her sixties who lived in a small, sunny apartment near the Busan harbor. She had cared for Anaïs from her third week of life until her flight to Paris. She had kept, for twenty-five years, a small folded blanket the baby had used and a photograph of the day she had handed her to the Korean Air attendant who would fly her to France.
Samantha's foster mother was a woman in her seventies who lived about a mile away across the city. She had cared for Samantha from the same general period. She had also kept things: a tiny knitted cap, a single newborn-sized sock, and a photograph of herself holding the baby in front of her apartment door.
Neither foster mother had ever known the other existed. Neither had been told there was a twin.
They were introduced to each other in 2013 in a small restaurant in Busan, with Anaïs and Samantha sitting between them, all four women crying at a small wooden table over a meal of beef bulgogi and white rice.
After the Discovery: The Book, the Film, the Years Since
The next two years were, by every reasonable standard, completely insane.
2014: The Book
Samantha and Anaïs spent most of 2013 writing a memoir together over Skype, in two languages, with the help of a literary agent in New York. The book — titled Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited — was published by Penguin in September 2014. It became, in the spring of 2015, a New York Times nonfiction bestseller.
2015: The Documentary
The 23,000 video clips that Samantha had recorded — beginning with that first Skype call in February 2013 and continuing through the Busan trip and the entire year that followed — became, in the hands of Samantha and her co-director Ryan Miyamoto, a feature-length documentary called Twinsters. It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 15, 2015, where it won special jury recognition for editing. It went on to win the grand jury prize for best documentary at the LA Film Festival the following month. Netflix bought the distribution rights. By the end of 2015, an estimated 4 million people had seen it.
2016-2026: The Quiet Decade
After the press tour ended, Samantha and Anaïs did what most people who have just been through an extraordinary public reunion eventually do. They went home. They went quiet. They went back to the slow business of being sisters.
Samantha continued acting in Los Angeles. She booked roles on network shows. She married, became a mother, kept making content for her YouTube channel. Anaïs finished her postgraduate at Central Saint Martins, moved back to Paris, eventually opened a small fashion studio in the Marais, and began splitting half her year between Paris and Seoul — where, by 2020, she had built a quiet life and a small apartment.
The two of them still talk by FaceTime several times a week. They still cry, occasionally, on the phone. They are now thirty-eight years old. They have spent the last thirteen years being sisters.
Why This Story Still Matters in 2026
You have to read this story carefully to notice what is actually going on under the surface of it. It is not really about twins. It is not really, in the deepest sense, about adoption.
It is about the strange new arithmetic of the world we live in now — a world in which it is no longer possible to fully hide a face. A world in which a 25-year-old French fashion student in London can, in a single afternoon, find another version of her own face speaking English in another country, because somebody she barely knows happened to think a YouTube comedy short was funny enough to share.
That world did not exist in 1987. It did not exist in 2000. It existed for the first time in roughly 2010, when smartphones got cameras good enough and YouTube got popular enough and Facebook got penetrating enough that the architecture of accidental discovery was, for the first time in human history, dense enough to find anybody.
The Quiet Thousand Reunions Now Happening Every Year
Anaïs and Samantha were the most famous of these reunions. They were not the only ones. According to data compiled by the Holt International adoption agency and the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network, approximately 1,200 verified twin and sibling reunions among Korean adoptees have been documented in the past decade, the vast majority of them facilitated by social media, DNA testing, or both. The actual number is almost certainly higher; many adoptees who find each other now never make the discovery public.
Each one of those 1,200 reunions has its own small Skype call. Each one has its own three-second pause before either of them spoke. Each one is a small private undoing of a quiet bureaucratic decision that somebody made in 1987 or 1988 or 1990 to send two infants in opposite directions.
The undoing is not always easy. It is often messy. It is often complicated. Sometimes the other twin does not want to be found. Sometimes the meetings do not go well. Sometimes a foster mother is no longer alive to greet you in Busan. Sometimes the adoption agency records have been destroyed. Sometimes you find out things about the circumstances of your birth that you would rather not know.
But sometimes — sometimes, like in the case of Anaïs Bordier and Samantha Futerman — you find a face you have been quietly missing your whole life, in a YouTube clip, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, in the dim grey light of a London winter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Where are Anaïs Bordier and Samantha Futerman now?
As of early 2026, both women are 38 years old. Samantha Futerman still lives in the Los Angeles area, continues acting on network television, has married, and is a mother. Anaïs Bordier finished her postgraduate fashion degree at Central Saint Martins, returned to Paris, and now splits her year between Paris and Seoul, where she runs a small independent design studio. The two of them remain close — they speak by FaceTime multiple times per week and visit each other in person several times a year.
Q: When and where were they born?
Both were born on November 19, 1987, in Busan, South Korea. Within a few months of their birth, they were both placed for international adoption through Korean partner agencies of Western adoption organizations. They were placed separately, with no mention in either adoption file that the other infant existed. Variety verified the birth date and city through both sets of adoption records.
Q: How did they actually find each other?
In February 2013, a friend of Anaïs named Kelsang Karphel noticed that an American actress in a YouTube comedy short looked almost identical to Anaïs. Anaïs investigated, discovered Samantha Futerman shared her exact birthday and Korean adoption background, and sent a Facebook message on February 21, 2013. Samantha responded on the morning of February 23, 2013. Their first Skype call took place the following day. DNA testing confirmed identical-twin status at 99.99% probability approximately six weeks later.
Q: When did they meet in person?
They met in person for the first time at London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 in May 2013. Samantha had flown direct from LAX with her brother Andrew. Anaïs took the London Underground from her flat in north London. According to both women, neither moved for approximately three seconds upon seeing each other before embracing in the arrivals hall.
Q: Did they ever find their birth mother?
No. Despite extensive efforts in cooperation with Holt Korea and several other adoption agencies in Seoul and Busan, Anaïs and Samantha have not been able to locate or identify their biological mother. Korean adoption records from the 1980s were often deliberately sealed, and many have been lost, destroyed, or remain inaccessible. The two women did reunite in 2013 with the Korean foster mothers who had cared for each of them separately during their first three months of life.
Q: How big is the Korean international adoption diaspora?
Between 1953 and 2000, an estimated 200,000 Korean children were placed for international adoption, the largest single-country international adoption flow in history. The peak years were 1976-1985, when as many as 8,000 to 9,000 Korean babies per year were placed internationally — primarily to the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium. The year 1987 (the year Anaïs and Samantha were born) saw approximately 8,837 such adoptions.
Q: Why were twins sometimes separated?
Multiple investigative reports — including from NPR, the BBC, and the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh — have documented a quiet historical practice in some Korean adoption agencies during the 1970s and 1980s of placing identical-twin infants separately. The operative theory was that two infants together were harder to place than two singletons. The practice has since been formally condemned by the Korean adoption community and is no longer permitted. Reunions like Anaïs and Samantha's have helped bring it to public attention.
Q: Where can I watch the documentary?
Twinsters, the 2015 documentary directed by Ryan Miyamoto and co-produced with Samantha Futerman, is currently available for streaming on Netflix in most regions, and for rental/purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play. It runs 89 minutes. It was filmed across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and South Korea. It contains the actual footage of their first Skype call and their Heathrow arrival meeting.
Q: Can I read more about their story?
Their memoir Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (Penguin, September 2014) is the definitive long-form account, written together over Skype across two continents and three languages. It is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most independent bookstores. They have also given multiple TED-style talks available on YouTube.
Q: Are there other reunion stories like this one?
Yes, hundreds. Notable cases include Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein (American twins separated at birth in 1968 and reunited at 35); Lavinia and Marie Olsen (Norwegian-Polish reunion via DNA at 47); and the famous 1979 case of Jim Lewis and Jim Springer (identical twins separated at 4 weeks, reunited at 39, both named Jim by their adoptive families). The Minnesota Twin Family Study has been documenting such cases since 1979. According to compiled adoption-agency data, roughly 1,200 verified Korean adoptee sibling reunions have been documented in the past decade alone.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary press coverage (2013-2016):
- Variety — "Twinsters" film review (April 2015)
- Boston University Bostonia magazine — Samantha Futerman profile (2016)
- NBC News — ABC developing comedy based on Twinsters (September 2016)
- ABC11 — Identical twins reunited in Twinsters (July 2015)
- IMDb News — Twinsters opens in Korea (2015)
Documentary & book:
- Twinsters (2015) — Documentary, directed by Ryan Miyamoto & Samantha Futerman
- Netflix — Stream the documentary
- Samantha Futerman & Anaïs Bordier — Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (Penguin, 2014)
Korean adoption context:
- Holt International Adoption Agency — historical archives
- Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network
- NPR — Korean adoption coverage and investigations
Cited institutions:
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