"I called my producer saying, 'This could be a flat-out catfish,'" Lang, a Toronto-based documentarian, recalled in a recent interview.
"He’s always been homeless, he has no identity, he’s never had a passport, never paid taxes. Literally, he is ‘anonymous’ …. It would be not implausible for somebody to read about these things and make up a personal narrative."
And so, Lang began sifting through Doyon's connections in hopes of separating fact from fiction.
The winding tale is captured in the TVO Original film "The Face of Anonymous," which makes its world premiere Thursday at a virtual edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.