Anita Doron
| Anita Doron | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 3, 1974 Carpathian Ruthenia, USSR |
| Occupation | Screenwriter, film director, film producer |
Anita Doron (born June 3, 1974) is a Ukrainian/Canadian film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, author, and a 2010 TED Fellow. Doron is best known for her adaptation of The Lesser Blessed (2012), a 1996 novel written by Canadian author Richard Van Camp. Her credits include music videos for several artists, as well as her feature films The End of Silence (2006), Late Fragment (2007), and Europa, East (2010).
Doron was born in Transcarpathia, a region of the former USSR. Her family members were high altitude mountaineers and they often spent summers in the mountainous regions of Georgia and Armenia. On her TED personal profile, Doron discloses that her parents’ ideologies influenced her own way of life early on. She states: “My mother rejected the official truth handed down by the government and my father refused the reality accepted by the middle class, leading me to seek and witness alternative truths from an early age.” At age 15, Doron was almost “sold into marriage for 200 sheep in remote Uzbekistan.” However, the deal fell through when her father realized he could not transport the sheep in his airplane.
Before filmmaking, Doron's initial creative outlet was poetry. She wrote her first poem after a family trip to the Black Sea when she was five years old. Her short poem about the sea made a strong impression on her mother, which encouraged Doron to continue composing poetry. Doron joined a young poets' group led by a local author and her poems were published at local and regional levels. Doron became “one of the youngest published poets in the former USSR.” In an interview with TED Blog, Doron explains that one of her published poems was criticized because readers did not believe that a child composed it. She eventually stopped composing poems to focus on filmmaking. She told a reporter: “I don’t write poetry anymore but, to me, filmmaking is poetry.”
Doron considers her shift from poetry writing to filmmaking a “natural transition.” While her poetry style was very visual to begin with, she had been experimenting with images from an early age because her father was an amateur photographer. Doron made her first film when she was 12 years old with the help of a friend and the friend’s father’s Super 8 camera. Doron’s subject was the man-made “Verke” river that ran through the city she was born in. This river was so polluted by toxic waste that the residents of the city were no longer able to swim in it. Doron and her friend attempted to document how it was being polluted, as well as, the community's thoughts on the subject, but the only people who cooperated with the teens were drunks roaming the banks of the river. Doron was eventually summoned to the city’s deputy mayor’s office where she was advised to abandon her project or her parents would lose their jobs. However, her mother and father supported her project and urged her to complete it. She eventually had the prints developed, but when they returned from the lab, the negatives were clear. In a blog post on her personal website, Doron explains that she does not think that her film was ruined by the “office of the deputy mayor,” but because of problems she had with the exposure. Nevertheless, this experience impacted Doron because she realized that her project had frightened those in positions of power. She states: “There was no turning back after that, because I saw how powerful filmmaking can be.”
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