Roy Cross grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, home of North America’s longest running short film festival. He found himself making Super 8 films in high school where an interest in punk rock, fast cars and the pursuit of the plastic arts snuffed out a promising career as a grocery clerk.
Since receiving a Fine Arts degree from the University of Regina in 1990, he has written, produced and directed numerous short films. They have played at festivals in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ann Arbor, New York, Paris, Oberhausen, London, Berlin, and others around the world. In 1994, after a three-year stay in Banff, Alberta, he moved to Montreal where he completed a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at Concordia University.
In 2002, Roy accepted a full-time faculty position at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, where he teaches scriptwriting, sound, and filmmaking courses. In 2014, he completed a five-year term as Head of the Film Production Program at the School. In 2015, Roy was awarded the Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award for superior performance in teaching, and in 2016, he was promoted to Full Professor at Concordia.
Roy’s first feature, So Faraway and Blue, was commercially released in Canada in 2003 to critical praise. He was the sole producer on Faraway, where he financed the development and a significant portion of the production phase. Roy has continued to write and direct short films while developing larger feature film scripts. He recently finished a first draft of The Last Ride to Blue Wonder, which continues his exploration of heroines and mythological stories. He is also in the sound edit and post-production phase of The Ballad of Ava, a fifteen-minute film in collaboration with two other Montreal directors.
In March of 2015, Roy completed a diary film, A Dark Blue Sky, that examines concepts of fatherhood and home after a divorce. He is currently researching low-toxic photochemical processes with his Labcaf project and methods for small-batch processing of motion picture film. He built a 4×5 pinhole camera and is undertaking tests to shoot a landscape and portrait project.
He is currently in post-production of a new film that explores grief and joy.