True/False Films

My Mother's Garden

In person: director Cynthia Lester.

Eugenia Lester has a hoarding disorder that has compelled her to fill her house with so much junk that she has to sleep outside and crawl through a window to gain entry. Her daughter Cynthia was forced to leave home at 13 because there was literally nowhere for her to sleep anymore. Now Eugenia is facing eviction and Cynthia and her brothers have returned to their mother's house in California where they are faced with piles of rotting garbage and their own feelings of abandonment as the children of a mentally ill parent. Cynthia films the process and explores the roots of her mother's problems: being raised by a Holocaust survivor in communist Poland and then transplanted to the consumer excess of the US. My Mother's Garden is a deeply personal film made with love, patience, compassion and a real desire to understand Eugenia's mental illness. Cynthia helps us to see the brave woman beneath the manic hoarder but is also fiercely honest about the pain and frustration that her mother's illness causes. (IK)