Anita Doron

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 On her TED personal profile, Doron discloses that her parents' ideologies influenced her own way of life early on. She wrote her first poem after a family trip to the Black Sea when she was five years old. 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. She then moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where she attended Ryerson University from 1998 to 2001. In her last year, she obtained an internship with Serendipity Point Films. In 2005, she directed the music videos for Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer's 2005 singles "I Am Aglow" and "Oleander". In 2006, she directed music videos for The Miniatures' "Actors and Soldiers" and Theresa Sokyrka's "Waiting Song" and "Sandy Eyes". A year later she directed Prairie Oyster's "One Kiss". Lastly, in 2009, she directed and crafted the illustrations for Octoberman's "Trapped in the New Scene". In a blog post, Doron explained that the illustrations were based on a fairy-tale she had written in her childhood about aliens. The subsequent animation of these images was executed by animators at Pixalite.

In 2006, Doron released her first feature film The End of Silence. Acting as screenwriter, director, and cinematographer, she shot the film in a "guerilla style" over the course of 52 days with a very small crew and budget. Doron wrote the script based on the story of one of her friends, "a former ballerina at the Kirov Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Broadway". Casting Sarah Harmer in a key supporting role, Doron cites this film as "the beginning of [her] love for non-traditional feature filmmaking with non professional actors". The End of Silence was screened at multiple film festivals including the Kingston Film Festival, Flint Festival, NXNE Film and Music Festival, and the Focus Niagara Film Festival. The film also won many awards in 2006, such as Best Feature at the Canadian Filmmakers Festival, Best Foreign Film at the Tahoe/Reno Film Festival, and Best in Show at the Female Eye Film Festival.

The Canadian Film Centre Media Lab recruited Doron in 2007 to work on Late Fragment, a project developed within the institution's Interactive Narrative Feature Program. This project was co-produced by the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and was led by Ana Serrano from the CFC and Anita Lee from the NFB. Working in collaboration with two other filmmakers (Daryl Cloran and Mateo Guez), Doron wrote and directed one of the three parts of Late Fragment. After deliberating, they reconvened at a later date to present their ideas and establish connections between the various storylines. and in preparation for the film, she travelled to the Northwest Territories to research the habits and lives of the First Nations people living there. Doron visited Van Camp's hometown, Fort Smith, and stayed there for a month to write the screenplay. After receiving funding for the project, Doron returned to Fort Smith for the casting process. In 2015, it was announced that Doron would be adapting the screenplay for the 2017 animated feature The Breadwinner.

TED fellowship Doron was a TED fellowship recipient in 2010. During her year-long mandate, she worked on a film called Talk Derby to Me with other TED fellows, including Jessica Green. After her mandate, she participated in a conference in Berlin for the TEDBerlin Salon in 2014. Doron's portion of the conference took place at Wiesenburg, an abandoned asylum. In 2005, she won the Kodak New Vision Fellowship. Over the course of this program, Doron was mentored in the creative and business aspects of filmmaking by the renowned Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and the co-president of Maple Pictures Corp., Laurie May. The following year she garnered a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 1st Canadian Screen Awards for The Lesser Blessed. However, she lost to Salman Rushdie.