One of the most acclaimed feature-directing debuts of the last year, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron premiered at the Locarno Film Festival where it picked up the Best First Feature Award, and will now be arriving this spring from Janus Films. Ahead of an April 17 theatrical release, the first trailer has now landed.
Here’s the synopsis: “In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behaviour from Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.”
Leonardo Goi said in his Locarno review, “All of Romvari’s works could be read as forensic exercises in which a young adult––often a budding cineaste––morphs into a kind of detective, exhuming secrets about her family’s past and wrestling with the aftermath of those discoveries. But in Blue Heron, the visual grammar literalizes those investigative impulses. Instead of milking cheap emotion from tight shots, Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic observe the action from a respectful distance, leaving the camera to linger outside windows and door frames, only to resort to frequent zooms that push against those very barriers, as if to eavesdrop on characters. In another filmmaker’s hands, those movements might have registered as voyeuristic; in Romvari’s, they speak to the limits of Sasha’s perspective. Centered as it is on Jeremy, Blue Heron is tethered to her point of view––the things she saw and heard, the things she was shielded from––and there are moments when the camera feels like an artifact witnessing action from the future, operated by someone who isn’t concerned with simply glancing at those memories so much as bringing them back to life.”
See the trailer and poster below:
