In Nine Behind, one of Sophy Romvari’s earliest shorts, a young woman is heard sobbing on the phone to her estranged grandfather: “I want to know my family.” It’s a line that haunts all the films the director’s made since. A Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Romvari has long been concerned with fractured identities, and her cinema teems with young, lonely drifters trying to suture them. Even when they do not directly address her lineage––as Grandma’s House, which superimposed old photographs of her late grandmother over shots of the woman’s flat in Budapest, Remembrance of Józself Romvári, a tribute to her grandfather, and Still Processing, which grappled with the loss of two of her brothers––Romvari’s works all double as personal archaeologies. Perched somewhere between autobiography and fiction, they unfurl as seances of self and cinema, and for all their loneliness, there’s something immensely cathartic about them, for director and spectator alike. This is why writing about them can be so difficult: they confront us with a kind of intimacy that can make words ring hollow, that pushes us to consider what can be said, and what––as is often the case across her oeuvre––remains hidden.
Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together.
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.
That’s the tragic tension at the heart of Romvari’s cinema. To the newcomer, her films might feel like sprawling family albums, but there’s nothing nostalgic or precious about the way she rummages through them. The old photographs, videos, and many other audio-visual mementos littering her work are shrouds, and in unearthing them, Romvari testifies to the impossibility of capturing something as fluid as time with the stillness of photography. Sasha’s parents often wield a camera to preserve shards of domestic bliss, but there’s a strange sadness hovering above these attempts, a melancholy that comes from treasuring a moment in the full knowledge of its inevitable loss. This isn’t to reduce Blue Heron to a kind of funeral, but to highlight the affection Romvari pours on these people and the world they inhabit. The fastidiousness with which she and production designer Victoria Furuya recreate the 1990s backdrop to Sasha’s childhood––from garments to soundscapes, with old Looney Tunes cartoons echoing across the house––does not suggest a treacly reverie for a lost past, but a director recreating that milieu with genuine care for all its textures.
It’s a critical commonplace to claim a film’s universality depends on how well it nails the specifics––that a work can only truly transcend its settings if it captures them with utmost precision and authenticity. But what happens when those details are rooted in unspeakable, scorchingly private sorrows? Granted, Blue Heron is a work of fiction, a far cry from the more unmediated Still Processing. But Sasha’s family is a stand-in for Romvari’s, and what’s most extraordinary about her first feature is the restraint with which she summons a long history of grief. “There are things that cannot be said aloud,” the director herself observed––notably, via subtitles––in Still Processing, and that ineluctable fact holds true here too. Romvari’s script doesn’t reveal––it intimates, and her film is all the more harrowing for the way it holds its secrets close to the chest.
Halfway through, Blue Heron fast-forwards 20 years into the future. Now a director, Sasha is reaching out to people––friends and strangers––in an attempt to figure out what went wrong with Jeremy, if his fate could have been in any way averted. She invites a group of social workers and records them as they offer their two cents. Unsurprisingly, those boil down to non-answers: “it’s hard to predict… it’s hard to tell.” It is a testament to Romvari’s disarming sincerity that Blue Heron does not strive to provide any of its own, and in the closing chapter––wherein past, present, and future all coexist, layered atop one another––a family reunion swells into a heartbreaking ghost story. For a director whose projects have always tested the medium’s capacity to conjure and make peace with the specters of one’s past, it feels like the kind of moment Romvari’s been working towards from the start. For a brief, miraculous instant, Sasha’s catharsis is ours too.
Blue Heron premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.