Will You Believe Your Eyes?

   

    My sister Elisha recommended The Imposter to us and Hannah chose it as our documentary for the week. The Imposter is a 2012 film, directed by Bart Layton, who is best known for his National Geographic Television show Locked Up Abroad. This film tells the story of Frederic Bourdin (Twitter, Facebook), who impersonated the kidnapped Nicholas Barclay to his family.  This film is sad on many levels but is a very interesting exploration of epistemology and criminal science.
   In 1994, thirteen year old Nicholas Barclay, was abducted while walking home from playing basketball in San Antonio, Texas. Though the police did a thorough investigation his fate is unknown to this day. Three years later in 1997, Frederic Bourdin was discovered in a small town in Spain and was taken to a home for abandoned children. Bourdin, who was attempting to find a place to stay, answered very few questions. All he said was that he escaped from a sex trafficking ring. When he was pressed for his name and information about his family he insists that he contact them himself. He then called police offices in the United States and asked for information about missing children, trying to find one that he could impersonate. He happened upon Nicholas Barclay's case and determined by looking at a faxed (black and white) missing person flyer that he looks enough like Nicholas to impersonate him.

He later finds out that Nicholas has blond hair and blue eyes and is panicked that he will be caught. He makes up a story that the traffickers beat and tortured him and injected his eyes with chemicals to make them change color. He even goes so far as to convince one of other children in the home to give him the tattoos that Nicholas is reported to have using a needle and a pen.  When his "sister" arrives and officially identifies him despite the discrepancies, he is shocked.  Bourdin convinced several officials including the United States Consulate to Spain and the FBI that he was in fact Nicholas and he was given an American passport and was allowed to travel "home" to San Antonio with his sister. Nicholas's family accepts him as their own despite the evidence to the contrary and the story of Nicholas's return to his family makes national headlines.  As if the story was not interesting enough a private investigator named Charlie Parker (Think: an old version of Shawn Spencer, equally as comic),

notices on a television interview that Bourdin's ears do not match those of Nicholas. He alerts the FBI (believing that Bourdin is in reality a Spanish spy) to the detail that they missed and they use DNA and fingerprints to determine Bourdin's real identity. After he was arrested, Bourdin asserted that the Barclay family had killed their own son. The FBI launched a new investigation which was eventually closed when no new evidence could be found.
   The beauty of this documentary is that it is an exploration of epistemology. Rather than spelling out actual facts the filmmakers use interviews that contradict one another and are often quite hard to believe to tell the story. The audience is then asked to make their own determination on what happened to Nicholas Barclay. Was the Barclay family so duped by their desire to see their son and brother alive that they overlooked glaring evidence that Bourdin was not who he claimed to be, or conversely, did they accept Bourdin into the family as a way to get away with murder?
   This film is very interesting but it has one significant drawback in that it is dramatized by a cast of actors as the interviews are playing out. Personally, I think this detracts from a documentary film in that you cannot study the faces of those who are giving information. It also cheapens the medium to cater to those who prefer entertainment over information and reason. That being said, this was an excellent film and is recommended.