Gary Heffern was born Veli-Matti Tervaniemi in Ivalo, a small town above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, and adopted out to a family in San Diego, California, in the 1950s. The film follows that transatlantic rupture: a Sami name traded for an American one, a childhood that the documentary describes as turning into a nightmare rather than the fresh start the adoption promised. Finnish filmmaker Erkki Määttänen builds the account around Heffern's own story, tracing what it meant to grow up erased from one identity and dropped into another with no say in either. The film stays close to Heffern as a subject rather than widening into a general history of international adoption, treating his particular losses, of language, place, and name, as the whole of its case. Details beyond his biography are sparse in the record, but the throughline is plain: a man reconstructing where he came from after being told, as a child, that it no longer mattered.