Movie Spotlight: sHEALed: Part 3 - Rising

The question started simply enough: what if a woman’s best years are not behind her? From there, everything else followed.

TereZa Hakobyan Lolli co-directed sHEALed: Part 3 - Rising with Anthony Lolli as the third chapter in a series that has moved through becoming, through awakening, and now into something harder to name but easier to feel. The film examines hormones, recovery, blood sugar, movement, and aging from a female perspective, not as a problem-solving exercise but as an act of reclamation.

Survival Is Not Enough

The series has always been personal. Hakobyan Lolli describes years spent focused on responsibilities, caregiving, achievement, endurance. At some point deeper questions started surfacing: what does it actually mean to feel well? “I realized that so many women were having the same quiet conversation with themselves,” she says. “They were no longer interested in just surviving. They wanted to feel strong, clear, connected, and fully alive again.” “Rising” grew from that realization.

The film presses directly against a kind of conditioning Hakobyan Lolli sees in the culture: the belief that exhaustion is baseline, that hormonal chaos is something to quietly manage, that survival is the ceiling. “Women are incredibly resilient,” she says. “We carry families, careers, emotional labor, expectations, and constant pressure, often while ignoring our own bodies in the process.” The film asks what becomes possible once a woman decides that is not enough.

Missing From the Conversation

The health conversation, as Hakobyan Lolli experienced it, had a gap. Women’s bodies are dynamic. Hormones influence mood, metabolism, sleep, stress, energy, and recovery in ways that rarely get addressed with the nuance they require. “What was missing was nuance, compassion, and personalization,” she says. “I wanted the film to create space for women to feel seen rather than simplified. We are not problems to fix. We are human beings trying to better understand how our bodies are communicating with us.”

The experts she sought out came from that same instinct: people who approached women’s health holistically, honoring complexity rather than reducing women to symptoms or statistics. Her own frustration shaped the questions. She wanted to understand why so many women feel disconnected from their bodies, and why it so often takes years for women to feel truly heard within health systems.

Where the Series Now Stands

Part 1 explored the early shaping of womanhood. Part 2 was about recognizing patterns and beginning to question what women have been taught to normalize. This chapter is different in register. “Rising is where movement begins,” Hakobyan Lolli says. It is the moment a woman starts advocating for herself differently, listening to herself differently, preparing for her future differently. The series shifts emotional key here: “It is no longer only about identifying what is broken. It is about asking what women can build moving forward.”

Family runs through that shift. Motherhood changed how Hakobyan Lolli thinks about health because suddenly her choices connect to the people she loves most. She also started thinking about legacy, what beliefs about stress, exhaustion, and self-worth are being modeled for younger generations. “I think healing often begins when women decide the cycle can change with them.”

What Surprised Her Most

What Hakobyan Lolli did not fully anticipate was how deep the disconnection ran. Again and again, she encountered women who had learned to override their own exhaustion, dismiss their symptoms, and normalize depletion as simply the terms of the life they were living. “Many had spent years believing their struggles were simply something they had to accept.”

What shifted the film was watching what happened when women started reconnecting the dots. Understanding how hormones, recovery, blood sugar, stress, and emotional health interact gave women back something they had been missing. “Clarity,” she says. “And with clarity came self-trust.”

What to Know Before You Press Play

“I would want them to know this film is ultimately about hope.” Not perfection. Not fear. Not impossible standards. “It is about reconnecting with yourself and recognizing that your future is still something you can actively shape.” Better years, Hakobyan Lolli believes, are not something distant or reserved for someone else. They are something worth creating.

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.