Blue Heron

The Locarno Film Festival is renowned for its careful attention to new voices and directions in cinema. This is especially true of its Cineasti del Presente section, which, as the name suggests, showcases in a very poetic way these directors not as filmmakers of the future but instead of the present, already here to be seen. Artists who are at their first attempts, but at the same time they’re already there, in the room with us, ready to be heard. One of these voices surely belongs to Sophy Romvari.

Born in 1990, the Canadian film director is a promising talent who has already had the chance to prove her skills in acclaimed short film documentary Still Processing (2020), which premiered in Toronto in 2020 and received critical acclaim. There, Romvari was exploring a deeply personal topic, uncovering for the first time, in front of the camera, a series of photos involving her two older brothers’ deaths. The same themes of familiarity and connection to Hungarian roots emerge in some of her other short works Nine Behind and Remembrance of József Romvári.

In her well anticipated feature debut Blue Heron, which is also having a Canadian premiere in Toronto’s Centrepiece programme, she deals once again with a story close to her heart, in this case mixed with fictional elements, in an extremely delicate blend between reality and imagery. The story written by Romvari focuses on a Hungarian family, made up of a mother (Iringó Réti), a father (Adam Tompa) and four children, the oldest coming from a woman’s previous relationship, that has just moved to Canada . For much of the film, everyone is talking about Jeremy, played by Edik Beddoes, and it quickly becomes clear to the audience that he is at the heart of the story. He often engages in criminal and violent behaviours and brings escalating tension into the family. The narrative focuses heavily on him, but also gives significant attention to eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), the only girl in the group of four. We also come to learn, with the passing of time, that Sasha has a sort of an adult alter ego, whose face is the one of Amy Zimmer. Nonetheless, the lines between different timelines tend to blur multiple times, especially in the second part of the story.

There is one striking element about Romvari’s film and that’s its incredibly believable pain that runs through every frame, embroidered with a poignant lyricism, that in some cases uplifts the tone, creating the right balance between grief and hope. The credibility of the film lies not only in its strong storytelling, entirely in the capable director’s hands, but also in the perfect framing of everyday life. In particular, several scenes show children playing outside, and the cinematography (Maya Bankovic), together with Kurt Walker’s editing, is crafted  magnificently in order to evoke a nostalgic feeling that resonates under the skin of audiences of any age or stage of life. Those timeless echoes of childhood feel vivid across generations and work perfectly with the successful fragmented narration. In fact, as the film moves forwards, it unfolds in a very unexpected way and, one could argue, the choice might create confusion in the audience, especially in the first temporal shifts. Only when the viewer embraces the idea that memory itself is fragmented does the film reveal its full depth and originality. After all, for each of us, childhood can feel extremely close, and simultaneously lost and distant: «I struggle now to remember much of my childhood. It only comes back to me in small fragments and even those memories are hard to trust,» says adult Sasha at the beginning of the film.
In Blue Heron cameras are present from the very beginning, whether as part of a phone or as professional equipment, and we see adult Sasha editing a documentary. Cinema becomes once again, for Romvari, a form of therapy that also involves the audience, and it’s this aspect that makes her touch so powerful: for the director this film is not an act of solitude, but an act of shared power with viewers. This is not always the case in contemporary filmmaking, which too often feels like self-talk – films made to be seen by an audience but in truth speaking only to their creators, failing to reach the “outside world”, remaining instead stuck in a sort of short circuit. Another issue with films that deal with grief is that they can have a sweet tooth for melodrama or for cheap tears. Especially when the writing tries too hard on a specific topic, the risk of not being understood by those who have not experienced that form of sorrow grows, and even then, no two sorrows are alike. What Romvari’s debut manages to maintain is this balance between the universal and the personal, without trying to fish for easy feelings.

Woven quietly into the background, the film reflects on the topics of immigration, isolation and shame. These emotions are attached to the family for two main reasons: they are foreigners, and they have something uncomfortable to “hide”. There is probably one scene that best summarises this, in such a powerful yet subtle way that  the scene is, by itself, worth the price of admission. While Sasha’s mother is cooking and talking to her daughter, the shot is focused completely on her hands as she mixes the ingredients. The two are talking about inviting some of the girl’s friends to the house, to which the woman answers: «I don’t want you to feel embarrassed because of what is happening here». It is obvious that a lot of Sasha’s trauma is also based on the sense of powerlessness experienced by her own family, as she states, with the usual innocence of the youth: «I am not embarrassed». «But you don’t know what people are saying», is the last proof that what the rest of the world has to say about our struggles only enhances them.

Ultimately, Blue Heron can boast one of the most beautiful ending scenes recently seen in films. A masterfully blended mix of technical quality and emotional involvement. But that’s a moment to be experienced, not explained.