Anita Doron (born June 3, 1974) is a Hungarian-Canadian film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, author, and a 2010 TED Fellow. Doron is best known for her 2012 film adaptation of the 1996 novel The Lesser Blessed, written by Canadian author Richard Van Camp.
Early life
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".
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".
Doron eventually illegally fled the USSR and immigrated to the Middle East where she settled for a short period of time. She then moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where she attended Ryerson University from 1998 to 2001.
Education and personal life
At Ryerson University, Doron studied film and enrolled in courses such as film theory, cinematography, scriptwriting, producing, and directing. In her last year, she obtained an internship with Serendipity Point Films. During her internship, she worked as an Art Department research assistant on Atom Egoyan's 2002 film Ararat.
In university, Doron was awarded two Norman Jewison Filmmaker Awards for her class assignments. One of the projects was her thesis film Simulacrum, which she wrote and directed. This short film also won Best Student Film at the International Festival of Cinema and Technology in 2002 and was part of the Official Selection at Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival For Children, Cleveland International Film Festival, and Leeds Underground Film Festival.
Doron has one son, who was born in 2011.