My Lost Russian Mother

An intimate tale of secrets and lies, family and ethnicity and one young man’s odyssey from America to Russia, searching for his birth mother.

Irish filmmaker Sam Jones, in his first feature documentary follows US citizen Gabe, trying to trace the mother he and his sister were taken from in childhood when they were adopted into America.

Gabe arrives in Russia high on expectation. He wants to know who he is and the truth about his childhood.

What he finds is not the loving parent he hoped for, but an alcoholic, a woman steeped in lies, darkness and death.

Sam is with Gabe, step by step, recording his first exchanges with his mother, nourishing him with love and hope as Gabe begins to coaxing her on the path to sobriety.

But as the relationship slowly unravels before the camera, Sam sees Gabe uncover a darker side of domestic life in rural Russia.

Gabe begins to see his mother through the harsh spotlight of her addiction, learning the truth of the brutal murder of his half-sister’s father and how his mother, then in the early days of her heavy drinking, was to blame.

Sam returns to Ireland and for a time loses contact with Gabe.

Then, he hears that in a tragic twist of fate, Gabe is dead. Having returned to finish college in America, Gabe began taking drugs and overdosed on heroin adulterated with Fentanyl.

Sam is devastated. All his friend wanted was to establish a relationship with his mother before she died. Now, he’s the one who has gone.

In an attempt to understand all that he has learned, Sam makes one last journey back to America to meet Gabe’s grieving sister and adoptive mother.

It’s the final act of a deeply personal journey. An attempt to make sense of the circle of loss, addiction and tragedy.