Drama documentary that focuses on the case of 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay, who went missing from his Texas home in 1994. Three years later a youth turned up claiming to be Barclay and was accepted by his family - despite speaking with a French accent and having different physical characteristics to the boy.
If this were fiction it might well stretch credibility to breaking point - but The Imposter is a documentary. In 1994, a 13-year-old named Nicholas Barclay went missing near his home in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later a young man in Spain claimed he was the missing teenager. Nicholas had blond hair and blue eyes; the man who turned up in Spain spoke with a French accent and had darker skin and brown eyes. In spite of these obvious differences he was accepted by the authorities and the boy's family - most of them, anyway. The trauma of his terrifying ordeal - involving kidnap, sexual slavery and a military conspiracy - was used to explain away other inconsistencies and memory lapses. However, after a few months the man's true identity was revealed: he was Frédéric Bourdin, a 23-year-old French-Algerian with a history of inventing new identities for himself. But that was by no means the end of a story that is in turn comic, bizarre and chilling. Director Bart Layton allows those involved to relate their version of events, though he also makes clever use of reconstruction and home-video footage: the result is that audience's perceptions are challenged as the film progresses. Many questions are raised, but not all of them are answered, in this extraordinary tale of deception and self-deception.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Bart Layton |
