After her short film Still Processing received widespread critical acclaim, Canadian writer and director Sophy Romvari has expanded on the same ideas in her feature debut, Blue Heron. Inspired by her own upbringing, the semi-autobiographical drama follows eight-year-old girl Sasha (Eylul Guven) in the late 1990s as she arrives in Vancouver Island from Hungary with her mother (Iringó Réti), father (Ádám Tompa) and three siblings. Her oldest brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) experiences severe mental health issues as the family try to settle into their new suburban home, and in the present-day we see an older Sasha (Amy Zimmer) reflect on this formative time as a 30-something filmmaker.
Shot through a hazy lens of memories, the fragmented narrative nicely captures the feelings of childhood; the curiosity, the boredom, the endlessness. As Jeremy’s behaviour takes a worrying turn, Sasha isn’t always seen by her parents but she sees everything and through Maya Bankovic’s sensory cinematography, we observe her day-to-day down narrow hallways or through doors left ajar. Her devoted mother is always busy, carrying the mental load while her father shirks responsibilities to entertain the other kids. When the focus jolts us forward to the modern timeline, comparisons might be drawn with Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun as in both, key characters bear witness to their own youth from a more mature perspective. In this case, Romvari adopts a bold metatextual style that cleverly blurs elements of faux-documentary into fiction like days and nights fading into weeks of a sun-bleached summer break.
A poignant portrait of a fractured immigrant family, Blue Heron is a confident, emotionally intelligent debut from Sophy Romvari. Intimately exploring grief, trauma, and the misinformation of memory through the innovative form of her craft, the director achieves something quietly impactful. At the heart of the piece is the expressive performance from newcomer Eylul Guven; with no fear or inhibitions, she embodies an optimism and lightness, unencumbered by the challenges of life to come.
Cinema Perspective 