Denis was born in Grenville, Quebec. At age 9, his parents divorced and he went on to live with his mother in Hawkesbury, Ontario. After a brief stay with his father, he was put in a juvenile detention centre because he had been hooked to smoking marijuana. At the age of 14, he escaped from the center he was assigned to and started living as a street kid in the streets of Montreal acquiring addiction to hard drugs in the process as a teenager. Denis assuming the pseudonym "Roach" became a squeegee teenager sleeping in parks, abandoned cars and refuge centers and was arrested many times. It was during these troubled times that he met EyeSteelFilm's director Daniel Cross who was planning to shoot a documentary film about squeegees and amazingly Roach offered to tell his part of the story by film thus beginning his career as a documentary filmmaker and activist.
Movie career
Eric Denis began first by documenting his own life as an autobiography, entitled "RoachCam" as part of the acclaimed directed by Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin. Using cinema as a motivation to get cleaned up, "Roach" has gone on to make two other films with EyeSteelFilm: RoachTrip is his directorial debut film. It is autobiographical take about the invisible punk highway from Quebec to the orchards of British Columbia. In August 2004, the film went on to win the second prize in the "Portraits" category" in Tver festival in Russia. He recently directed Punk the Vote!, again an autobiographical documentary which saw Roach and fellow punker Starbuck run for Canadian federal elections against Liberal incumbent Jean Lapierre, in an informative, hilarious take on Canadian politics punk-rock style. Eric Denis didn't win the election. Roach had 101 votes. His main goal in this film was to give the homeless the opportunity to vote. From his works also is the short filmZLEA: Zone Libre d'Expression Anarchiste in 2005. Eric "Roach" Denis' films have played in festivals such as Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, in Tver, DocsDF and Nemo. TICKETS is about the police tactic of issuing large numbers of minor infractions against homeless people in order to “evict” them from public areas, eventually relocating them to prison. This new film by Eric “Roach” Denis—himself a former “street-kid” with thousands of dollars of fines to his name—examines the social, financial and human cost of criminalizing Montreal’s homeless community. By following this issue from the Ministry of Justice, to the streets, and finally to prison, the film aims to investigate what is happening to the rights of society’s already alienated street community. It was shown at Festival du Nouveau Cinema, FICFA, RVCQ and other festivals. Denis has also did some conferences on the subject around the province of Quebec.
