Blue Heron

There are questions we encounter in childhood that, left unanswered, harden into memory. From that intractable matter, Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari sculpts her sublime debut. With remarkable subtlety and generosity, she doesn’t fill her film with half-hearted answers but with a warm glow that softens the sting of those questions. In Blue Heron, Romvari approaches the enigmatic Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) through the eyes of Sasha (Eylul Guven), his youngest sister.

Jeremy is a searching soul, “as sweet as he is predictable.” His hobby of drawing detailed maps of the cities he has lived in seems like an attempt to gain some kind of hold over a world that otherwise eludes him. When his family emigrates from Hungary to Canada in the late 1990s, Jeremy struggles to adapt, and a quiet tragedy unfolds at home - not in sudden shocks, but in daily lost battles and the absence of meaningful support. The family slips into crisis, one the eight-year-old Sasha cannot fully grasp. How might things have turned out differently? Now an adult (and a filmmaker), Sasha (Amy Zimmer) seeks clarity through her own perspective and through her father’s home videos and photographs. The result is a beautiful play of textures. In the family home - now existing only in her memory and on screen - there is a wild overgrowth of recollections, small gestures, and familiar sounds (from the Game Boy, the fridge, …). These fragments bring Sasha closest to her childhood, often more so than the events in the foreground, for the confrontation is not always direct. This is elegantly anchored in the visual language: young characters appear behind windows, screens, branches, or in reflections.

Romvari’s meticulous direction, in perfect harmony with a strong cast and Maya Bankovic’s stylish cinematography, creates ideal conditions for cinema’s full power to shine through. Blue Heron soothes every heart that longs for the nineties—and for that coveted, imaginary place where past, present, and future can flow together freely, perhaps even to soften one another.