# 🎬 “I Want to Keep Making Cinematic Tarot Cards”: An Interview with Anita Doron
**Anita Doron—Oscar-nominated screenwriter (*The Breadwinner*) and director of acclaimed works such as *Maya & Samar* and *The Lesser Blessed*—joins Queer Film Hub for an intimate conversation about searching for authenticity in the Tlicho Nation, keeping the "wildness of heart" alive in filmmaking, and raging against the fragmentation of our world.**
---
*We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Anita Doron for her warmth, poetic vision, and generosity in sharing her time and reflections with Queer Film Hub. Below is our exclusive interview.*
---
“Words and stories have the power to evoke hidden emotions in others,” says Anita Doron. The filmmaker behind deeply evocative titles like *Maya & Samar*, the raw coming-of-age adaptation *The Lesser Blessed*, and the Oscar-nominated animated feature *The Breadwinner*, pulls back the curtain on her creative process. In this exclusive dialogue, she discusses casting from within Indigenous communities, navigating the tension between guerrilla passion projects and larger productions, and crafting cinema that functions like poetic tarot cards—reaching deep into our inner landscapes to connect us across time, place, and identity.
---
### 🎙️ *The Lesser Blessed*: Uncovering Authenticity in the Tlicho Nation
> **Marek / Queer Film Hub:** Your adaptation of *The Lesser Blessed* captures youth, trauma, and identity with such raw, poetic authenticity. Looking back, what was the most transformative element of bringing that specific story to the screen?
**Anita Doron:** My friend Sheley Niro, who is a filmmaker and visual artist, gifted me the novella *The Lesser Blessed* and, knowing me, suggested I make this film. Indeed, I fell in love with the voice of Richard Van Camp, the author, the setting, and the main character—a metalhead poet teen.
I was fortunate to conspire with one of the greatest producers, Christina Piovesan, and we set out to make the film. So here we come to your question: the most transformative element…
I was adamant to find the main character within the community Richard wrote about—the Tlicho Nation. Christina had the bravery and foresight to support this mission. We got into a tiny but very stylish airplane in Edmonton with my 8-month-old baby and my casting director Jason Knight to find Larry. We travelled from community to community, school to school.
And at the very school the author attended, I spotted a lanky teenager with melancholic eyes that revealed a very intricate intelligence. He didn’t even come to the audition; he had better things to do! But in my gut I knew he would be the perfect Larry. I convinced him to try out, and of course he was magical. He was living in a world he knew, but through his innate talent and emotional intelligence, he brought the main character to life with aching authenticity.
---
### 🎙️ On Narrative & Identity: “Cinematic Tarot Cards”
> **Marek / Queer Film Hub:** Your filmography often delves into deeply human, nuanced spaces of belonging and personal truth. What core themes or emotional questions consistently drive you as a director and storyteller?
**Anita Doron:** In truth, I don’t consciously know. I fear that if I become too aware of my motivations, if I articulate what is going on under the proverbial hood, some of the magic will be lost.
But I can tell you how it all started, and maybe that point of origin can shed some light on the rest. When I was six, growing up on the edges of the USSR, I spent a summer by the Black Sea and saw bioluminescent plankton at night. I was mesmerized and wrote a tiny poem. It was nothing much, but it affected my mother. It made her feel things, and it transported her. Two little sentences: *“I can’t tell you the secret of the sea. The secret of the sea is its beauty.”*
To this day, I do not understand why these two banal sentences made her feel so much, but I did understand then and there that words and stories have the power to evoke hidden emotions in others. And it ignited something in me that can never be extinguished.
I want to keep making **cinematic tarot cards** that can reach deep inside a person to beautifully perturb their inner landscape, to reveal something, and above all, to connect across time, place, culture, and identity into a humanist oneness.
---
### 🎙️ Creative Process: Rewilding the Heart
> **Marek / Queer Film Hub:** As a director, writer, and versatile artist, how do you navigate the shift between personal, indie-driven passion projects and larger-scale visual storytelling?
**Anita Doron:** The key is to approach it from the same fire in the belly. What drives me to make a small guerrilla film with friends or a large, international production is the same and can be traced back to the eyes of my mother.
With guerrilla films, I have the freedom to experiment, and I can take more time to craft things. But I do not have the apparatus to ensure the film is completed and, most importantly, reaches an audience. With more structured and responsible productions, I have to find the way to plug into that wildness of my heart and keep it alive so that the film too can have a chance at being authentically feral, clawing into the void with arms of longing.
This is the real challenge—to keep rewilding my heart even when the machinery overtakes and can make you forget the pure and simple guiding core.
---
### 🎙️ On Queer & Diverse Cinema: Stories That Rage Against Fragmentation
> **Marek / Queer Film Hub:** Queer and marginalized perspectives in film continue to evolve rapidly. From your vantage point, what kinds of stories do you feel cinema urgently needs to amplify right now?
**Anita Doron:** Stories that are unmanufactured. Stories that take risks, stories that explore something new in fearless ways, stories that upend beliefs.
Stories that make us remember who we are or who we hoped to be. Stories that play with our souls. Stories in which we feel the filmmaker's passion and derangement. And above all, stories that rage against the fragmentation of our world.
---
### 🎙️ On the Horizon: Upcoming Projects
> **Marek / Queer Film Hub:** Looking forward, are there any upcoming projects, creative avenues, or personal milestones you are currently exploring that you can share with us?
**Anita Doron:** I am very excited to be adapting a precious Hungarian novel into an animated feature film. *Tündér Lala* (*Fairyheart*) was written by Magda Szabó at a time when she was blacklisted by the authoritarian regime and was only allowed to publish children’s literature. Brilliant as she was, she snuck a devastating critique and also love for humanity into a fairytale.
I am also thrilled to be adapting the photographs of Ayana V. Jackson into an underwater, Afrofuturist tale with my co-director Nadia Darries.
Last, I'm beginning the beautiful journey of writing a script for a brilliant Japanese stop-motion director, Takeshi Yashiro, about a Matagi, a traditional and marginalized bear hunter.
