Filmmaker of the Month

Tell us your backstory. How and why did you get into filmmaking?

I grew up in a suburb of Montreal, Canada, and when I was younger I wanted to be a marine biologist specializing in sharks. Unfortunately, all the attack stories in my shark books scared me off of that idea. While growing up, my parents often read books to my brother, sister and I, and movie nights in the city were always a popular event in our house. I slowly fell in love with storytelling, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Our mother had cancer off and on during our childhood, and since our parents couldn’t express negative emotions well, I think us kids turned to storytelling as a way to process our stress. I graduated college with a Liberal Arts degree and took two years off to snowboard, eventually becoming sponsored by Burton snowboards and briefly going pro. When my mother passed away just after my 21st birthday, I decided to study film in Concordia University’s Communication Studies program. In fact, all the Uloth kids eventually became filmmakers. After graduation, I made several short films that did well and wrote a pile of screenplays while working in various positions on film sets to pay the bills. I was a grip on Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator for a summer, which has a lot of fun. In 2013 I wrote the first draft of what would eventually become Moment. While I was rewriting it and trying to get production financing together, I got my first job directing television, co-creating the adventure show Chasing Monsters with the show’s host and producer, Cyril Chauquet. It was a fun (and intense) first TV experience, which brought me full circle when I finally got to hang out with real marine biologists and even swim with sharks during filming. We filmed Moment in October/November of 2017 and finally finished it in 2019. It’s done very well since then, winning over 30 awards, which has been a nice surprise for everyone. After all that hard work, it’s nice to know that the film is connecting emotionally with audiences.

Tell us your backstory. How and why did you get into filmmaking?

Believe it or not, I started my professional career as a college football coach. After coaching for five years, I realized I liked my job but didn’t love it. My heart wasn’t into it 100%. Thus, I did some soul searching and headed in the direction of what wasn’t “work” to me and that turned out to be acting.

What’s harder? Getting started or being able to keep going? And what drives you to continue making films? Well when you start that feels like the hardest thing because you have no map and you are all full of fear and “what ifs” and at the same time this hubris of inexperience that gives you a confidence and optimism to get started in the first place. – Learn more about filmmaker Vanessa Roth here.