WELCOME,
SORRY YOU’RE HERE
When filmmaker Gayle Ferraro lost her nephew Colin to overdose in 2022, she was set adrift and racked with guilt. Why couldn’t she help him? As she searched for meaning, she found a peer-support grief community, others who shared her pain, and a vast, national network of those left behind by raging opioid epidemic — and an often indifferent world.
Now, as Gayle meets with her support group each week, we explore the lives of its members — even as Gayle herself searches desperately for meaning and peace with Colin’s death. WELCOME, SORRY YOU’RE HERE will chart the myriad of different, often-surprising forms that grief and remembrance take, asking: How does grief work? How do the dead live with us? How does overdose really impact families? And as group members pour themselves into charity, activism, community, and even projects like this film, we ask: Is grief just an obliterating void? Or can it be transformed, through time and action into something profound, that can help light the path for others?
In Production
Expected release: Spring 2026
According to the CDC, more than 105,000 Americans died by drug-involved overdose in 2023. But as tragic as these numbers are, the real impact of these losses is much harder to measure. Each of those individual deaths leaves a range of survivors with jagged holes in their lives, building into an epidemic of grief and loss. The sheer scope has become hard to fathom: More than 40 percent of Americans — hundreds of millions of people — know someone who died by overdose.
The pain of substance use-related death is usually most profound for surviving family members, who can find themselves paralyzed, devastated by guilt and sadness — living in a personal post-apocalyptic reality. Further complicating the burden, social stigma around substance use and overdose deaths can keep people from talking about their grief, leaving them to despair in solitude. Yet despite the taboo, having this kind of death in the family has become a sadly common experience: Just under one in 10 Americans has lost a family member to overdose. Called an “overlooked emergency,” the collective emotional toll has become a crisis of its own.
After losing her son Nick in 2015, Robyn Houston-Bean founded The Sun Will Rise, which facilitates peer support meetings, provides community, and delivers other resources to those grieving a loved one.
Group facilitator Darlene Mersereau, who lost her son Chris in 2016
With no other solution in sight, “Welcome, Sorry You’re Here” immerses us in substance use-specific peer-support communities, who build a net to catch grievers in freefall. These grassroots networks bring ordinary people together to mourn, grow, and sustain each other. Local meetings and organizations tie into national and international grief communities, who hold concerts, meetups, and conferences, channeling the force of collective loss into action — whether that be offering resources for those still experiencing addiction, participating in restorative justice projects, or just providing support when people need it most.
Right now, the demand for these networks is growing every day as the opioid crisis persists, leaving more and more people bereaved. Amid a worsening problem and a lack of decisive political action, we believe providing viewers with the raw truth of these experiences is more important than ever. “Welcome, Sorry You’re Here” will present an intimate portrait of a particular kind of grief, the company it keeps, and how survivors find healing and a path forward — all told through the filmmaker’s own experiences and community.
