Restore

RESTORE tracks the compelling journey of Thomas Hübl.

For over two decades, Austrian trauma expert and author Thomas Hübl has guided thousands of people worldwide through collective trauma processes — from Holocaust legacies in Europe to racial wounds in the United States, from the scars of colonialism to reconciliation efforts in Rwanda. His work brings together ancient wisdom traditions and contemporary neuroscience, bridging spirituality with psychological inquiry.

Growing up outside Vienna, Hübl was close to his grandfather who carried a lot of trauma from his time as an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier in World War II. He sensed the unspoken weight of war in his family carried by both his grandparents but lacked language for it. Much later, when Hübl began leading group seminars on meditation and trauma integration in Germany, a puzzling and unexpected phenomenon repeatedly started emerging. Without any direct prompting from him, many participants suddenly experienced intense sensations and inner images connected to World War II and the Holocaust. Hübl realized that, through working with individual trauma in a group setting, he had inadvertently encountered layers of collective trauma. This new insight inspired him deeply and shaped the direction of his life’s work. But what does collective trauma work demand from Hübl as facilitator emotionally, relationally, physically? And what are its limits?

For the past one and a half years these questions have become ever more urgent for the Austrian who lives in Tel Aviv with his family. Since October 7^th 2023, he finds himself holding spaces amid fresh waves of collective shock, grief, and polarization, while living inside a region directly touched by violence. Restore bears witness not only to Hübl’s healing efforts, but to moments of uncertainty and moral complexity asking what it means to remain present when reconciliation feels fragile or out of reach. Against the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented world, Restore explores the possibility and the limits of healing. Rather than offering political answers, the film approaches the core question of reconciliation through lived experience: what does it take to truly meet one another again?