Oscar Winner Daniel Roher Talks Nat Geo Doc ‘Blink,’ About a Family Who Travels the World After Life-Altering News

In 2020, Daniel Roher read an article about a French Canadian couple Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletie who decided to drop everything and travel the world after learning that three of their four children were losing their vision due to a rare, incurable eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa. The family of six embarked on a one-year global journey to help fill their children’s memories with breathtaking destinations and once-in-a-lifetime encounters.

“It read as this inspirational news story,” says Roher, who won the Academy Award for “Navalny” in 2023. “I was like, ‘That is a real lovely story. Isn’t it nice to have a life-affirming news story in a sea of depressing and sad news stories?’ So, I clocked it, and then a couple of months later, our friends at MRC reached out and said we should do a documentary about it.”

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The result of that conversation is National Geographic‘s “Blink, ” an 84-minute documentary that follows the couple and their children, Mia, Léo, Colin and Laurent, on a 12-month trip to 24 countries. The film, which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September, will open in 150 theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 4.

Variety spoke to Roher and “Blink” co-director Edmund Stenson ahead of the film’s theatrical release.

Daniel, Ed was as an associate editor on “Navalny” but had never directed a feature doc. How did you end up co-directing this film with him?

Daniel Roher: I understood that the commitment of dropping everything and traveling around the world for a year was not something I could do at that moment. My wife and I were starting a family, and it was a crazy time in my life. I understood that there was only one person in the world who I could trust to come work on this with me and that was my best buddy Ed. We have been collaborating on films together for many, many years. We know each other. We have shorthands. So, I called Ed and said here’s the story. Do you want to go on a trip around the world with this family? And he said, ‘Absolutely. Sign me up.’ It was as simple as that.

The premise of the docu is pretty depressing — three children are eventually going to lose their vision. But interestingly, the film isn’t a downer. Did you know going into the project that you wanted to make it an uplifting doc?

Roher: It might be hard to spot a throughline between the last film Ed and I worked together on, which was “Navalny,” and “Blink,” but one of the connective tissues of both of those movies is that you take subjects that should be very challenging, serious and intense, and you treat them with the levity and humor that often exists in real life. That is something that is a very important cornerstone value to Ed and me. So, we understood that we wanted to make a film that had a sense of humor. You can laugh or cry, and the Pelletie family chooses to laugh and go on adventures and make the most of a very challenging context. That’s why if you take something that, on the surface, might be depressing and turn it upside down, you can make it funny, life-affirming, and beautiful.

When did you realize that grief played a major role in the doc?

Edmund Stenson: After couple of shoots Daniel and I felt like, with our editors, that we had started to identify what might be the emotional through line in the film. And that was something that someone who watched [the cuts] described as anticipatory grief — living in an unknown state looking towards the future. What we found so meaningful and universal about it is was that there is a sense in which we are all kind of grappling with an unknown future and the way that we live in the present. This [story] is an instructive example of one way [to do that], but it doesn’t have to be about our vision impairment. It’s really about what do you do when you hear news that reshapes your idea of what your future could be

Ed, did your work as an editor influence your work as a director on this film?

Stenson: Absolutely. There are times when you are lucky enough as a director to watch real life unfolding and cut the scene in your head. A lot of documentary is not that. It’s like, ‘Well, I have some ideas. Let’s see where it goes.’ But I found what was crucial for us on the road in making the film was having that ability to understand what we had got and to be pre-editing purely in my head and sometimes on the page. It helped ensure that we didn’t go on too many trips that we didn’t need to go on. Or film too many things that we didn’t need to film. Because obviously, as you can imagine, with a project like this, there could be an excessive, endless amount of footage, and that was not something we wanted to do. We didn’t think it would be good for the story either.

“Blink,” unlike “Navalny,” is not political in nature. Were you hesitant to make another political doc because they aren’t selling right now?

Roher: It had nothing to do with the challenges or difficulties of getting political films financed and the ever-corporatization of nonfiction filmmaking. What it has to do with was my personal journey, what I was interested in doing, and my fear, frankly, of being pigeonholed as the guy who does political docs. That’s not how I see myself. So, my instinct said, you just finished a political film, do a complete one-eighty.