What To Expect
Heartfelt Storytelling
Heartfelt Storytelling
Heartfelt Storytelling
Long-Term Filming
Heartfelt Storytelling
Heartfelt Storytelling
Unique Perspective
Heartfelt Storytelling
Unique Perspective
Log Line & Story Synopsis
LOGLINE: A New Orleans Inner-city drama teacher confronts her long buried past while fighting for two former students who share her similar tragic childhood.
Everybody has a story ...
'TWIN STORIES' opens with a New Orleans drama teacher urging her students to always speak up and tell their story – something Diana was forbidden to do as a child. The film then flashes back 10 years, as twin 16-year-old boys who Diana had committed to help, Dwight and Dwan, are forcefully removed from the only city they know and dropped off in a Missouri farm town.
First the boys are welcomed, but then resented. A year later, Dwan is attacked and left for dead – slashed with a box cutter. Still, with their housing project in New Orleans shuttered down, and most public schools still closed, the twins have a realization that they are stuck in Missouri. They face another stark reality. They have been placed two grade levels ahead based on their age, despite learning that they are reading at a second grade level.
Diana is often the twins' only ally. Even before they were sent to Missouri, as a teacher using radical tactics to fight what was relentlessly happening to her students, she picked up a camera to try an experiment with the twins. One day in 2004, she said, 'I told your mom I would take my little video camera and record things you want me to understand; stories that are important to you.' She recognizes that she saw much of her own childhood in the lives of her students, and wants to do for Dwan and Dwight what she couldn't do for her own sister, who died at 16.
By explaining what happened to the twins over the past several years, Diana works with a group of current students, and pushes them to tell their own story. The film takes a twist with a call from an old friend of Diana's parents, Nurse Laurie Conrad, who ran a nursery that she attended as a small child. “Nurse” calls with a trove of new information about Diana’s parents. Nearly on her deathbed, she helps Diana learn of her own past, and offers insight into what she can do now to help the twins survive.
For Diana and the twins, there are new beginnings as she learns her whole story, and they learn to tell their own.