About this episode

Ariana Victor discusses her journey as an investigative filmmaker and the challenges of activism in relation to mental health and documentary filmmaking.

Ariana Victor is an investigative filmmaker whose first decade in this work has been one long act of refusal — at twenty, inside a treatment program for eating disorders, when a therapist took notes on her late-night creative sparks and reached for a bipolar diagnosis, she walked out and started asking harder questions. That refusal became a method: Carey Gillam’s Whitewash, the Bayer-Monsanto courtrooms, five years inside geoengineering territory, and Just Look Up, a documentary that just won Best Feature Documentary at the Santa Monica International Film Festival. The conversation lives in the territory underneath the film. Ariana names the activist’s trap directly — how unrelenting attention on the shadow can poison the nervous system of the people most committed to waking others up — and offers the mantra that kept her in the fight without destroying her: play is protection. We talk about the nocebo as placebo’s evil twin, nervous system regulation as the actual dividing line between healthy advocacy and ideological self-destruction, the ego path versus the soul path, and why she eventually laid down the sword and let the softness return. Underneath all of it is the simple…

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