RETURN TO THE MOTHERLAND
Presenter Alex Gilbert’s own adoption experience underpins a new family-reunion series about New Zealand-raised orphans tracing their birth parents in Russia.
Twenty-eightyear-old Victoria Rundle is missing a piece of herself. What she knows is that she wasn’t always who she is now; that at the age of five, she was adopted from a Russian orphanage and brought to New Zealand by her adoptive parents, to whom she is grateful. It’s not so much that she has always wondered what the rest of her story is, as that she can’t move on with her life without knowing it.
So begins the first episode of Reunited. Outwardly, the six-part series is part of an established factual television genre, the family-reunion show, but it devotes relatively little screen time to the sleuthing involved in tracing lost family members. Its focus is more on the intense, complicated emotional experience of needing and getting answers – and its most distinctive element is that its host has walked the same path as its subjects.
Alex Gilbert of Whangārei was born Gusovskoi Alexander Viktorovich on April 1, 1992, in Arkhangelsk, Russia, making him part of the same generation of Russian children adopted out to foreign families as Rundle. His search for and reunion with his Russian birth parents was captured in a TVNZ Sunday report in 2014 – the same year he published the first of two books about his adoption experience and the year before he founded I’m Adopted, a charity for young adults who need to know their stories.
“There were more than 700 children adopted from Russia to New Zealand in the 1990s and into the 2000s, and we have a lot in common,” he says. “We all grew up in a normal life in New
Zealand. I had a great childhood here. But a lot of us are trying to connect with that Russian side. Victoria, she’s from Gore, she’s working as a dairy farmer and then she goes all the way back to Russia. She remembers speaking the language, but she has since lost it. It’s like an identity crisis, a big culture shock.
“Victoria was actually quite angry when I first told her about her birth mother: why did her mother not come back to the orphanage? But then she hears the other side of the story from the birth mother: she realises that she couldn’t come back, she wasn’t able to. Then she talked about how it completed her and made her feel whole again, because she was always missing that part of her life. She wanted to know – she just wanted to know.”
While you’re watching this unfold and sobbing on the couch, you may notice that the only person who’s not in bits about it is Gilbert himself.
“I’m not trying to look like some strong Russian person, I hope I don’t look like that,” he laughs. “I really do get emotional about it. But it’s different when you’re there. I was just very, very happy for her when she was connecting with her birth mother.”
While the experience can be challenging for everyone involved – Gilbert’s birth mother has struggled to
“It made her feel whole again, because she was always missing that part of her life.”
process their reunion – the adoptive parents in Reunited are all supportive of their children’s need to know.
“Some might have been hesitant in the beginning, but I think they felt more comfortable with me going along with their children, rather than them going by themselves.”
Gilbert is now a Russian citizen, speaks the language and has lived in Russia for months at a time, notably during the shooting of Reunited. His journey towards his own identity is tracked in more than 200 videos on his YouTube channel, where his television experience (he came up through junior roles at Choice TV and TVNZ and now works for Stripe Studios, the production company behind Reunited) shows through.
He has also appeared many times in Russian media, notably as the subject of The Man From Nowhere, a documentary by Russian journalist Katerina Gordeeva. Russians, he says, are big on family and the authorities have generally been keen to help. For Gilbert and Rundle, that meant being granted entry to Severodvinsk – the centre of Russia’s nuclear submarine industry and a place Westerners are generally not allowed to go, let alone with TV cameras – to visit the orphanage where her adoptive parents found her.
“We had planned not to film at the orphanage because we couldn’t get in. And then the next day, we got a letter from the administration of the city. They were lovely people, that orphanage was great. The city it was in was not that great. But the orphanage, they did such a good job.” ▮
Reunited screens on TVNZ 1 from Tuesday, 8.25pm, and on TVNZ OnDemand.