Transcendence: A Journey Of Hope & Healing

Ten years in the making, this intimate documentary follows four torture survivors as they navigate their healing journeys, rebuild their lives, and reclaim their dignity after coming to the U.S. seeking refuge.
by
Jane Wagner
2026
77 mins

Filmed over ten years at Bellevue Hospital's world-renowned Program for Survivors of Torture, this intimate documentary—the first of its kind—follows four asylees working with care providers to heal from unimaginable cruelty, rebuild their lives, reclaim their dignity, and find the strength to speak out against those who sought to silence them and their communities.

Synopsis

For more than 30 years, asylees have come to the world-renowned Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture carrying unimaginable trauma. The “big village” welcomes refugees who have experienced political, social, gender, and religious persecution. Transcendence tells the stories of four survivors from Tibet, Chad, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone who have seen humanity at its worst. Now, in a remarkable journey of healing, they reveal the human spirit at its best.

Offering an intimate and rare window into what it means to reclaim one’s dignity, Transcendence is a vérité film that celebrates resilience and hope. Filmed over 10 years, four survivors and their care partners reveal a global epidemic of human rights abuses in which oppressors of all kinds seek to silence individuals and terrorize communities into submission. Too often, they succeed. But Transcendence delivers a powerful blow against that silence. As each person tells their story, they reclaim the voice their oppressors sought to take away. By speaking out, they become human rights warriors who transform their experiences into acts of courage and resistance—and remind us that even in the face of extraordinary cruelty, the human spirit can endure, heal, and ultimately transcend.

Director Commentary

The inspiration for this film began with a conversation about how trauma reverberates through generations. For Wagner, it was the silence around her father’s severe PTSD from WWII. For DiFeliciantonio, it was her grandmother, who was gang-raped as a refugee during WWII and remained silent about it for 50 years. We wanted to explore what makes healing possible when silence is broken.

Over the past 40 years, our films have focused on the intersection of storytelling and social justice. We strive to place the people most affected—often disenfranchised—at the center of the narrative, allowing audiences to embark on a complex, compelling journey beyond cold statistics and sensational headlines to understand the human beings behind them.

We learned about Bellevue Hospital's Program for Survivors of Torture through a New York Times profile of its co-founder, Alan Keller, M.D., who described the global scale of torture and its deliberate function as a tool to silence individuals and communities into submission. He spoke about the millions of torture survivors living with unimaginable pain and deep, invisible scars, many in desperate need of help. He also described the underlying governmental and economic forces that give life to, enable, and perpetuate torture, extending far beyond the perpetrators themselves.

We knew we had found an untold story about silence, trauma, and resilience that had to be told. We set out to make these stories visible, these voices heard, and to explore what can happen when survivors are finally given the support and opportunity to tell their stories and fight back against those who sought to take away their lives and dignity.

Features and Languages

Film Features

  • Closed Captioning

Film/Audio Languages

  • English
  • French
  • Jamaican Patois
  • Tibetan

Subtitle/Caption Languages

  • English
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