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Mona Friis Bertheussen's documentary film Twin Sisters is a compelling story of identical twins from China, separated and later adopted by two different families, one living in Norway, the other in the United States. The blood ties of the girls are confirmed only after both families have settled into their new adoptive lives. The emotional dilemma created by this revelation and its subsequent effects on the sisters provide the narrative arc of Bertheussen's documentary. At the center of this story is an irresoluble divide between a biogenetic history and an ongoing adoptive transnational existence. Chapter 8 argues that this emotional and psychological rift is primarily bridged through cinematic dramaturgy. The film's visual and audio channels of representation, as well as its creative location shots, mythologize rather than realistically depict the transnational separation of the twins. The film's exposition and rising action, its subplots of abandonment and rescue, including dramatized states of coincidence and circumstance, all conflate into an elaborate semiology. In short, this is a mythological enactment of destiny, where the legal and social work of transnational adoption is pushed to the margins of a viewer's awareness. As Shima reads Bertheussen's documentary, the mythologizing in Twin Sisters is a way to turn particular histories into a naturalized presence, a story equally true and unreal.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_8

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