When creating my documentary, I wanted to show a common experience of most twins: moving away to different colleges and living without each other for the first time. Throughout my entire life, I always had someone by my side, helping me make decisions and shaping my identity. Everyone knew we were twins, and by many, we were known as “the twins” or “the Ostrow twins”. Moving to college, no one knew my other half unless I told them, something I had never experienced before. But, despite being on this new journey by myself, my twin brother, Zach, and I are always connected by our home in Baltimore, Maryland. Every break we get to reunite at our home, taking us back to the times when we still lived together, had the same friends, took the same classes, etc, which is what I wanted the message of my documentary to be. My experiences as a twin and in college have significantly shaped who I am as a person, and the same with my brother.
Being both the documentarian and one of the subjects in this documentary, my life experiences shaped what images I chose to include vs exclude. I chose to primarily choose pictures of just my brother and me (besides when I mention family and the few back-to-school photos that include our little sister), to emphasize that this experience is unique to twins, and we are the only people in our family who experienced this.
In my documentary, I wanted to begin by giving a visual representation of our maps and the physical distance between us. This shows audiences the physical distance that separates us, something a year and a half ago today, we had never experienced. It also demonstrates to viewers where our two physical homes are now, establishing the space between us, but how we are still connected by a consistent place on our maps. Beginning the documentary with Apple Maps also shows how both literally and in Robert Coles’ terms, our locations have shifted, and with that, our identities have also evolved.
Something I chose to include as images in the documentary are some of our first day of school pictures through the years. Every year, on the first and last day of school, our mom has us stand outside our home with a sign and take our pictures. These pictures show that as we grew older, we started our days at home, together. These photos also show the different houses we lived in throughout our lives. Although our physical home changed throughout our lives, our idea of home and the family and connections made remained the same. The side-by-side of the two pictures of my brother and me in our dorm rooms represents not only our shifting homes as we began a new chapter in our lives, but they also served as our first day of school picture, just now, without signs, our shared home, and each other.
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