Talking to God

About 8 years ago I went to the Ukraine, to a small town barely on the map, to experience a miracle. I was experiencing a challenge in my life. The only thing that helped me was a book I read together with a friend. The book’s main message was, “it’s all from God, it’s all for the best, accept everything with love.” It was a tough pill to swallow, but somehow reading the book and implementing its wisdom was the only thing that got me out of my own personal hole.
Later, another friend invited me to go to Uman in the Ukraine to visit the grave site of a Jewish mystic from the 1700’s whose ideas inspired the book I had been reading. At first, I thought she was crazy, but three months later I found myself exactly there, in Uman, with a group of women I had almost nothing in common with and on my way to the gravesite. I felt very little while I was in Uman, other than uncomfortable, since our lodgings were not exactly the Ritz Carlton.
When I returned, I felt different in a way I couldn’t explain, and when the opportunity arose to return a second time, I jumped at it. While I was there, the idea of making a film about this experience came to me and I had to do it. I’d never been drawn to making films about spirituality, but somehow it didn’t matter.
I wanted to make a funny and fantastical film about the experience I had and all I learned along the way. Even though Talking to God is a fictional story about a filmmaker with “troubles” who travels and dreams about a fixer and a king and a spiritual surgeon; it’s really a film about how to be happy; something I desperately wanted to learn how to do.