I have watched the film Tell Me Who I Am, produced by Netflix, more than once, and each time I feel as if I am discovering it again, not because of its surprises, but because of its honesty. The film is one hour and twenty-five minutes long and depends on only two characters: the twins Alex and Marcus. What is strange about it is that there are not many archival scenes, multiple interviews, or side conversations, only two men talking about memory, childhood, and the truth that is hard to say.
What distinguishes this documentary is that it does not give you its keys from the beginning. It starts from a tragic point through a motorcycle accident in which Alex completely loses his memory, except for knowing his twin brother Marcus. But what initially seems like a gradual reconstruction of a lost memory later turns into a painful revelation about how the past can be reshaped based on lies and fabricated stories.
The film contains many knots, but it is built with a calculated sequence. There is a plot that unfolds in three stages: memory recovery, discovery of lies, then facing the truth!
And with each stage, your relationship with the two characters changes, and you begin to realize that what Marcus was trying to hide is not simple, but an existential wound that concerns them both.
In the final moments of the film, the strongest plot comes when the twins sit face to face in a scene that is one of the most expressive moments of silence in the history of documentaries. Marcus confesses the truth he hid from Alex for decades — that in childhood they were subjected to regular sexual abuse inside their home by their mother and her friends, a truth that Marcus tried to bury and chose to replace with a fake family image, giving Alex a “happy” memory, believing that this would protect him from pain, without realizing that the lie would lead his brother to live with a false identity.
This type of film is a clear example of how visual economy and relying only on the characters can produce an intense narrative that does not need visual noise or large technical interventions to be convincing.
Ali Omar – Documentary Filmmaker
