Can stories save lives? Exhausted from her struggles with depression, filmmaker (and occasional superhero) Dawn Dreyer decides to bet on it. Her chronic depression and isolation are potentially fatal; the pain of a million creative but unmade ideas, crippling. So she decides to make an animated documentary about her struggles with depression and anxiety, following the adventures of Bipolar Girl, and to seek out other folks with the lived experience of mental illness, who might be willing to collaborate with her or tell their stories. What starts as a terrible idea (how can you make a film when you can’t even get out of bed?) becomes a decade-long animated odyssey that lands Dawn at the Tribeca Film Festival standing on the red carpet next to Whoopi Goldberg. BIPOLAR GIRL RULES THE WORLD bears witness to the life-saving powers of storytelling, the human desire for connection and community, and the capacity of individual voices, interpreted and amplified by the visions of animators, to engage the imagination, where deep change happens, individually and collectively. Mental illness doesn’t define Dawn, but in a crucial moment of her life, it propels her forward.
