The Netflix original documentary Tell Me Who I Am, which premiered at the 2019 Telluride Film Festival and will be released globally on Netflix and day and date in select theaters on Friday, October 18 – in NY at the Quad Cinema.
Directed by Academy Award nominee Ed Perkins and produced by two-time Oscar winner Simon Chinn, Tell Me Who I Am is a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful voyage that explores the blurred boundaries of memory and reality, and the emotional bonds that allow us to survive.
How far would you go to protect someone you loved? If it meant rewriting history, would you?
In 1982, 18-year-old Alex Lewis’s life changed forever. Following a near-fatal motorcycle accident, he woke from a coma, grateful to find his identical twin brother, Marcus, by his bedside. Except Marcus was the only person he remembered from his life before the accident. All other memories had been lost. Alex had no recollection of his mother, his stepfather, and how their lives had been before. He didn’t even remember who he was. There was only after, and it fell to his twin Marcus to provide him with his identity and his lost “memory”. As Marcus assumed this new role of parent, teaching Alex where everyday objects were, what things were called and, crucially, the complicated rules of living in their family home, he took a critical decision: to erase some of their darkest family secrets and create a new reality for his brother.
These secrets remained in place for nearly 15 years until Alex and Marcus’s mother died and the twins were tasked with unlocking rooms in their house to which they had previously been forbidden. The carefully told lies could not withstand the questions that Alex began to ask. He demanded answers and Marcus was then faced with having to reveal the truth to his brother, knowing it would shatter his brother’s reality all over again.
In Tell Me Who I Am, Oscar-nominated director Ed Perkins gives the Lewis twins space to tell their story their way, as they painfully explain why they needed to share this with the world. Along with Oscar-winning producer Simon Chinn, the filmmakers unravel a compelling narrative of secrets and lies that asks a number of difficult questions in search of the truth.