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Ten Days. Ten Lives. One Take. In search of Freedom.
Getting Off The Wheel is an intimate, vérité-driven documentary following 10 individuals from Singapore at a 10-day Innerwork Retreat set in the spiritual landscapes of Kumamoto, Koyasan, and Awaji Island, Japan in the final season of 2025.
Drawn from actual events that unfolded during the retreat facilitated and hosted by award winning master coach and trainer Hun Ming Kwang of Innerwork Circle and guest teachers Dr. Gary Reiss, 8th Dan Shihan Ikeda Hiroshi, 7th Dan Shihan Munetsugu Sakabe, and captured entirely unscripted in One Take, the film captures a profound collective process: Each participant enters with histories marked by trauma, inherited beliefs, family systems, conflict, and unspoken emotional burdens, and each is invited into a space of world work, deep democracy, healing, recalibration as they process, reconcile, and to meet different parts of themselves and each other in a shared sanctuary.
These are not reenactments, but real, unfolding human stories caught in the exact moment of rupture and healing: A three‑generation family sat together in the same space, confronting the intergenerational silences and unspoken histories that have shaped each of their lives, as they examine the possibility of stepping out of the rigid roles and duties they were forced to accept within their family structure and begin to unravel the inherited fractures each of them once carried in silence. Around them, very different lives collide. A career military regular who signed on the day he left polytechnic, obeying his father’s instructions without ever asking what he wanted for himself, now forced to confront how little space he gave to his own desires, his body, and his sexuality; A master‑certified coach, respected in the field, who at 40 still feels like a child fighting to fit into a world that told him who he was not allowed to be in his LGBTQ+ identity against the lifelong religious and societal shame he felt he was constantly faced against; A C‑suite, unravelling a lifetime of fear stemming from a deeply critical and cynical mother who treated every mistake as a death sentence, now watching that same script fracture under the weight of an affair; A well respected vice‑president of cybersecurity at a major bank, watching her mother fade into dementia, grappling with whether she can forgive a lifetime of resentment; A fractional CFO—cold, calculating by design—who could not shed a tear when her ex‑boyfriend died by suicide, now tending to her dying mother and being asked to thaw the numbness around her heart; A young mother in her 30s, just nine months into motherhood, was suddenly upended by a life-threatening autoimmune diagnosis enters into the retreat searching for the root cause of what collapsed inside her body that conventional medicine was not able to provide. As she speaks, another story emerges—her physical breakdown did not emerge in isolation, but from the slow, steady compression of all sides—the unresolved tensions of the extended family in the undercurrents that left her no space to exist. The retreat quietly surfaces a question that cuts to the core of her life: did she marry only the man she loved, or did she unknowingly marry the entire family ecosystem—a war zone of inherited conflicts she was never prepared to fight?
The 48-minute film gently reframes a question we often ask ourselves—what does it mean to live our lives well—by proposing a more radical inquiry: What would it mean to die well? What does it mean to be truly free and to let go? What is true and total freedom: to step beyond the scripts, the assumed identities, and roles we were given—often without our deepest consent—so that we can finally live from our own voice, our own body, our own truths, in our own right?
Getting Off The Wheel suggests how we live is inseparable from how we prepare to let go, not only of our bodies but of the patterns, roles, and identities that have carried us through life. It asks how we might transcend the wheels of ‘Samsara’, a concept widely spoken of in Buddhism—and echoed in modern pop culture through stories like ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Cloud Atlas’ — the same old stories, repetitions, and compulsions that keep us running in circles within systems generation after generation.
It is not a documentary about quick fixes, perfect breakthroughs, or heroic endings. It is a quiet, relentless record of individuals of day to day lives trying to stop running the same old scripts, to stop living by default, and to finally start living with more awareness, honesty, courage, and love than what the world ever prepared us for. It is a film that speaks to anyone who has ever felt trapped inside roles and identities they never get to choose— and who has secretly wondered: what would it feel like to finally step off, and to get off the wheel?
At its core, the film explores what it means to become awake in a conscious, deliberate way, to be truly free, while the world around us remains deep asleep, haunted by collective traumas, inherited ghosts, and unresolved histories. It invites us to recognize the unseen forces that shape our choices, relationships, and destinies, and to ask: if awakening is possible, what would it look like to step out of the cycle, to interrupt the scripts we once accepted that no longer serve our highest good of all, and to meet both life and death not with fear, but with clarity, honesty, courage, and love?
Directed by Ming Kwang Hun, Jeremy Ho, and Gary Thong (Singapore)