When a twin dies, is the sibling who is left behind still a twin? This is the dilemma at the heart of Lone Twin, a new documentary from Toronto’s Storyline Entertainment, airing this week on TVO.
The film, by writer/director and lone twin Anna Van der Wee, mixes the personal – Anna’s own story – with the universal – interviews with other twins, lone twins and experts in the field – to reveal an emotionally-rich terrain that most of us “singletons” have never even contemplated.
Van der Wee, above left in black, posits that twins are as close to being soulmates as two people can be. The film ultimately follows her to Nigeria, which has the highest birthrate of twins in the world, where she experiences the catharsis of a special ceremony performed for twins who have lost their “other half.” It’s a fascinating rite and a fitting denouement for the doc.
Van der Wee is Belgian, which is fortunate for producer Ed Barreveld, left, who was able to shore up a co-production arrangement that paved the way to funding the project. When I met the producer last week to discuss the film, he bemoaned changes to the Canadian film funding apparatus – the Canadian Television Fund was deep sixed in 2010 and is now the Canadian Media Fund – that are making it harder and harder to produce one-off documentaries as opposed to series or new media projects.
“I’ve remortgaged my house twice now to stay in business,” Barreveld told me. “It’s a really precarious business. A lot of filmmakers are leaving the fold because it’s gotten so tough. Some of them end up doing reality television.”
The new rules are forcing domestic filmmakers to be more creative about financing: “Typically, I would expect a license fee from a broadcaster of about $100,000 and we’d match it with another $150,000 from the CMF and then I’d have 40 to 50 per cent of my budget in place and I’d just need to raise the remainder from grants or international sales. But that base doesn’t really exist anymore and without it it makes it so much harder to get it together.”
Barreveld must be doing something right, Lone Twin debuted at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) last November and he has several other documentaries in development; Storyline won Gemini Awards in 2005 (Shipbreakers) and 2009 (Tiger Spirit).
Lone Twin was been cut in English, French and Flemish, all three versions narrated by the director herself. “There’s a slightly different flavour to each of them,” observes Barreveld. “Anna’s tone is different and it changes the character a bit.”
If the conclusion of Lone Twin was cathartic for the director, the film has had a similar effect on her family. “It was contentious for them,” observes Barreveld. “For her family the grief of losing her twin brother — pictured above with the director, he died tragically at age 20 — had been put in a little box and sealed up a long time ago. Her older sister felt that Anna was manufacturing some of this grief and she wrote a letter to her about it. It wasn’t until she had a chance to see the finished film that her sister really connected the dots and finally understood Anna’s pain. She understood twinship better. I understood twinship better.”
And viewers of the film Wednesday night will definitely understand twinship better; Lone Twin airs on TVO, February 15 at 9 pm.
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What a powerful documentary! As a lone twin myself (for 5 yrs) I could relate to many of the issues Anna brought up in the film–the feeling of being alone in her family, the void left when a twin dies, unconditional love. It’s not only a film for twins but a bridge for family and friends to truly understand what it’s like to lose a soul-mate/twin.