Filmmaker Chava Floryn Explores Trauma and Healing after the October 7 Massacre

[Music] Hava Floren such a pleasure to have you on the show it's a pleasure to be here Yan thank you for having me uh Hamas released bodies of hostages and a few infants when 9 months what do what what do you make of that whole situation it's a very very difficult situation Yan and it has tremendous um tremendous pain that a lot of people have been suffering from as a result of this news this is very serious and if um a lot of the stories that we told in our film was surrounding children and the effects of war that it's had on children and on families and the one thing we've seen is how it affects children's sense of play sense of safety um and really on both sides of the aisle this isn't just one there are children who are suffering in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine generationally how this is going to impact so many people obviously what happened in the last few days is it's beyond devastating and um my whole goal in making the film resilient was to create a space for people to take in ways that we can heal during the crisis and afterwards to figure out a way to move forward forward and um it's going to take time it's going to take a long time but I do believe that one of the things that I noticed when I was in Israel 16 weeks after the war was in the fields where the Nova Massacre happened the en that the anemon flowers were blooming and it looked like a carpet of just red blood if you want the truth and it just made me cry because it made me realize that within every area of loss there's always birth that comes afterwards always and that is really what the Jewish people and what the Israeli population stand for is our ability to move through life and to choose life every single time even in the wake of such tragedy and darkness yeah I mean there's even some reports that one of the bodies that was returned was not the person it was not Sheri it was not the mom yes right very upsetting and so well and I mean this plays kind of directly into your the the work that you're trying to do it feels to me the question we have to ask ourselves is how do we move through such Devastation how do we move through it how do we show up the next morning when we're feeling so brokenhearted how do we do it and the one thing the Israeli population T me when I was there is they do it through Community they do it through song They drew they do it through showing up and finding purpose and Mission one of the people that we interviewed was this incredible man named AR dular who every single day would go to all of the hotels and just deliver teddy bears to the children who were displaced there were 200,000 displac families as a result of October 7th from the north and from the south and you know what we had the LA fires two weeks ago and I thought to myself my God I would love to pay it forward so I called one of our our Don our donors and I was talking about this and she said well let's do it let's do a teddy bear drive for the children who have lost all of their toys in Los Angeles and we did and within 30 minutes of me asking a few friends I got 13 pallets of teddy bears donated we gave out 5,000 teddy bears to children all over the Los Angeles Basin as a result of what I learned from the Israeli population in Israel 5,000 children who had lost their toys who had lost their homes had a little bit of love and the one thing that we put on the teddy bear was this little sign that said Mr Rogers once said that when bad things happen you have to look for the helpers and all over Jerusalem and all over Israel there are helpers people who are doing incredible things to create meaning and purpose in the wake of this horrible conflict like 150,000 or maybe it was 200,000 volunteers that showed up within four months to help pick the oranges in the beautiful gardens right outside of the Kut Sim that were attacked because all of the Thai workers had either been killed or had fled we're talking people from all over the world Yan who had shown up in the Israel's time of need there are so many Beautiful Stories coming out of Israel people from all over the world going there and volunteering and helping and participating and bringing healing like the neuros the neuropsychologist that we interviewed in our film Dr orley patterer she's incredible and she created a initiative called the Israel healing initiative and the goal is to go in there and not just bring healing to the Israeli population but also to the Palestinian population you know it's our goal we would love to send in nerve stimulators to help calm people's nervous systems down I mean this is this is this is an epic moment in history for the whole world we're in a postco world where everybody is suffering where everybody is dealing with crisis management where emotional depression is on a massive rise across the globe and I just saw what was happening and I thought to myself there's got to be something we can learn from how the Israeli population cope well so that's interesting so I was going to ask you about the Genesis of the film and indeed I think you you started answering that question and also like you know kind of your background and your work fit into that tell me about that so um I've been a filmmaker for 20 years but around the time of Co um I realized that there was a real problem within the communities of people coping during the lockdown so I started a podcast called the nurture series interviewing therapists and healers and all different kinds of people way smarter than me about how to cope during crisis how do you parent better how do you couple better how do you nurture yourself and from that um I ended up writing a book called everything's going to be okay how to nurture yourself during a storm and the reason why I called it everything's going to be okay is because when I was a child my father used to tell me a little cute thing he would say every time things were going rough he would say which meant everything's going to be okay and he knew that things don't always turn out okay he was 9 years old when he lost his father who was a World War II veteran and he had experienced a lot of loss in his life and every time we experienced any kind of loss in our family my mom and my dad would always say IB to us because it's not about necessarily knowing that things are going to be be okay it's about having the intention you're going to make it okay and um I ended up really trying to heal myself I was diagnosed with severe PTSD um authorities had said that my father was actually murdered and we dealt with a lot of questions around how he died when he was 60 and in that year I had lost 10 different friends and family and it was very intense so as a result of going through my own PTSD I I started really researching ways to heal myself and ended up learning that I had this gift of being a Healer A sematic Healer I have a practice in Beverly Hills and I sometimes practice in Florida as well and um that's why I went on this Mission um there was this Mental Health Mission I was invited to go to in Israel and I was invited on a Saturday night leaving on a Wednesday Tuesday morning I thought to myself I think this could be a documentary I had no absolutely nothing planned not one interview but I figured I would find the stories because Israel is just so rich with them and uh now we have a feature documentary yeah I mean congratulations and you know I I love the the focus on helping people kind of get through because I the film I I've watched uh parts of the film and I can see the focus is on helping people get through the trauma yes right yes one of the things that we saw um when we were there was we had um kind of taken a look at a what a brain looks like when it hasn't gone through trauma versus a brain who has been running for 7even hours and have for their lives and you can see that the network of a brain that that's been running for 7 hours and is severely traumatized and dealing with PTSD is not as fired up which which means that they're they're in fight ORF flight mode the whole entire time and there's all these amazing innovative ways that people are moving through dealing with recalibrating the nervous system which is what I do every single day I get to do this with with patients but I just I think that this entire event is going to just take so much of our effort to take a look at ways that we can heal ourselves as a population um and that to me as a human story that has no sides oh fantastic so where can people watch the film well right now we're in doing the film festival work uh circuit we're going to be at the nrb Christian Media convention next week screening it several times with uh Jerusalem tours who are is our co-sponsor which is very exciting um one of the and we're we're really kind of we're waiting for more dist you know distribution we were in the Miami Jewish Film Festival the boeh Jewish Film Festival estival last night we were screened at the Golden State um Festival in uh at the Chinese Theater so we're making the rounds we're looking for distribution and um I know we're going to find it cuz it's resonating with audiences you know this is a human story at the end of the day is how do you move through crisis and how do you do it valiantly and how do you cultivate life in the midst of Darkness well Hava Floren it's such a pleasure to have had you on thank you Yan so nice to be here thank you for having me thank you all [Music]