Directed by Ron Bourke
Country of Origin United States
Runtime:37:30
Terror and Hope: the Science of Resilience is a story about children and war. It’s about stress so severe and prolonged, it can become toxic. It’s about scientists and humanitarians working to provide hope in what can seem like a pretty hopeless world. And it’s the story of courageous Syrian families raising their children in the face of unimaginable violence and oppression. Their past defined by terror, their future driven by hope.
Current neurological and behavioral science offers insights that could have a lasting impact on how we help these children of war to break the cycle of violence. For peace to be even remotely possible, we will need a generation of young people with the capacity to positively adapt to adversity.
Our story is told by those immediately involved: Neurological and behavioral teams from Harvard, Yale and Hashemite University; Humanitarian program developers and coordinators in the U.S. and Jordan; and most of all, the young researchers and humanitarian volunteers. If there’s hope for the future of refugee children and youth, it’s due in large part to the teams of aid workers and researchers putting science to work for the oppressed and vulnerable. Terror and Hope tells their story.
Director Biography – Ron Bourke
Writer/Director/Producer, Ron Bourke Films. Independent documentary filmmaker. Ron’s previous doc, “Lessons of Basketball and War” has been an official selection in more than a dozen international film festivals and is currently available on Amazon Prime in the US and UK as well as on Kanopy for streaming by over 3000 Universities and Public Libraries globally. Ron’s newest film, “Terror and Hope, The Science of Resilience,” documents the efforts of an international team of researchers to better understand the impact of stress on the lives of displaced refugees from war-torn Syria.