For Daniel Roher, 21, the short film format makes sense. His hunger for adventure and his startup company’s limited funds, make picking up and travelling to far-off places on a shoestring highly enticing.
“If I was doing a feature, it would take me two years,” Roher explained. “In the past year and half, I’ve made three films in three different places across the globe.”
The largely self-taught filmmaker, a native Torontonian who dropped out of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, speaks with the confidence of a young person who’s achieved sudden success.
“A lot of feature-length documentary films I watch suffer from ‘documentary syndrome’ – they’re just too long. Mine are succinct, engaging, entertaining stories.”
Roher founded his company, Loud Roar Productions, in 2011, and has since written, produced and edited four diverse films. Never Far From Home features a group of boys going about their lives in a sleepy town in southern Georgia; Kids of the Rocket Siren looks at the daily realities of sirens and rocket shelters for kids living in Sderot, Israel; Resolute (2014) examines a community in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, and Bashir’s Vision features a blind Ugandan man who turns to boxing as a refuge from poverty and depression.
Roher’s work has been featured in festivals throughout North America. Kids of the Rocket Siren, which Roher funded with his bar mitzvah money, was shown at Jewish film festivals in Toronto, San Diego, Atlanta and Los Angeles and won best short documentary at the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, as well as best short documentary at the International Film Festival of Puerto Rico.
“When we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s always these generalities,” he said. “I wanted to tell a specific story about actual individuals who are affected. About young kids in Sderot who have grown up with rocket fire as this total normality – that’s what was so crazy to me. A car would backfire and I’d be running to a shelter and these kids would be laughing at me.”
The fact Roher’s films were all shot in wildly different places is no coincidence.
“It’s the place that interests me,” he said, noting that inspiration usually hits after he’s become immersed in a new culture.
For Resolute, Roher secured financing from the government of Nunavut, and lived for five weeks with an Inuk family.
“I felt compelled to go up north because, as a Canadian filmmaker, I view it as our wild west, this rugged, unabashed outdoors… I picked a community but didn’t know what the story would be.”
Though his reception was initially quite hostile, he soon met Zipporah, a 67-year-old community matriarch and survivor of the High Arctic relocation of Inuit people by the Canadian government in the 1950s.
“Sitting in her home felt like sitting in my bubbie’s living room in downtown Toronto,” Roher recalled. “What set me apart in Zipporah’s mind was that I was Jewish… her people had had to wear identification tags… I told her that my people also had numbers, that my grandfather has a number tattooed on his arm. She really responded to that.”
Roher is currently working on a new film about the late William Lyon Mackenzie King’s work with spiritual mediums.
“I’ve assembled the best mediums in Ontario, and we want to go to Laurier House in Ottawa and have a séance where we try to interview King.”
While Roher acknowledges that his isn’t always the most practical way to work, he’s reluctant to give up the headiness of it.
“I’m a young person who doesn’t have any responsibilities, basically. Because of that, I can do these amazing adventures. I live for that… to go somewhere and really experience the people and the place.”
