An emotionally autobiographical work in line with the filmmaker’s previous short films, which straddle the world of creative nonfiction, Sophy Romvari’s debut feature film “Blue Heron” mines her family’s own painful history to craft a tender film that expands the potential of what a coming-of-age film can be.
Blurring the lines between the past and the present, the film follows eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who, along with her Hungarian immigrant parents and her three siblings, has relocated to Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. As the family adjusts to their new surroundings, her oldest brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) begins to display potentially dangerous behavioral issues.
A Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker based in Toronto, Romvari has spent the last decade making powerful, personal films that explore the tenuous connections we all have with time and with memory itself. Romvari studied film at Capilano University and holds an MFA from York University. Her highly acclaimed short film “Still Processing,” which was her thesis film at York, examines the unresolved grief held by her family over the death of her two older brothers. Her short films have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and True/False. They have been featured as a collection on Criterion Channel and in a retrospective at the Museum of Moving Image.
Writing out of the film’s world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Swatch First Feature Award, Robert Daniels praised the unique structure of “Blue Heron,” finding that it was made with a “startlingly raw vulnerability” and that it “hits with such precision, it could break you open from the inside.” A few weeks later, the film had its Canadian premiere as part of the Centrepiece program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Best Canadian Discovery Award.
“Blue Heron” has played festivals all over the world, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, the Bangkok International Film Festival, and the San Sebastián Film Festival, and was named the Best First Feature and awarded the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Romvari over Zoom about how images and image-making impact our experience of time and memory, why making short films is the best way to build up your filmmaking prowess, and being part of a lineage of women who use personal filmmaking as a way to reflect on issues of society at large.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I first saw your film at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. I didn’t know the plot going in, and it quietly destroyed me because when I was a teenager, I also had emotional issues, and I ended up in foster care. I was like Sasha’s brother. I was like Jeremy. So, watching this film brought up a lot of emotions and made me think about what it was like for my brother to be my sibling while I was going through all of that.
I think this is a movie that taps into some deeply unnameable emotions. You’ve taken this film around to several festivals, so I wondered if you’ve had other people come up to you and talk about how it touched them in similar ways, even though it is so personal to your experience?
Thank you for sharing that story with me. It means a lot to me, especially when people who relate more to Jeremy than to any other character connect with the film. Because I think that was the intangible thing that I couldn’t know. When you’re representing an experience outside yourself, you don’t know how it’s gonna be reflected for other people. So it means a lot that you felt a reflection in that experience.
It has actually been a very heavy film to release, for obvious reasons, but also because of the reactions from the people who have been watching it. I feel like I’m carrying a lot of emotional response, which is such a gift, but it’s also very heavy, because it almost comes with guilt, in a way. I’m seeing people’s very emotional reactions, and people are telling me very difficult things that maybe were locked inside them, and to make something that allows people to have that response is a privilege. But also as a human being, I’m like, whoa.
I really tried to focus on depicting my point of view as a sibling, because that was a perspective I hadn’t seen this kind of story be told from, and it also was the perspective I felt I had the most authorship over, and I didn’t want to speak for my brother or my parents. But obviously, I can’t depict my own experience in a vacuum. So, it’s been interesting to see people respond in relation to all of the different characters like this. There are the siblings who respond, having related to that experience; there are the Jeremys; and then there are the parents.
The parents are really difficult. Those conversations have been quite difficult. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve lost children. Or siblings who have lost siblings. There is a communal catharsis that I feel occurs. During Q&As, people are vulnerable and open up about these, like, really difficult things, which is so beautiful. But as a filmmaker, I don’t always have the tools to respond the way I want to. I know they’re responding to the movie, but I want to respond to their response in a way that validates their emotional experience, yet I don’t always feel like I have the right words. So it’s been an interesting and heavy experience for that reason.
Do you feel that through the making of your shorts, you were able to process a lot of the emotions in order to get to a point where you can make this feature film?
I do think I couldn’t have made this film, had I not made all the short films, both artistically and emotionally. I think I was trying all sorts of things and different filmmaking approaches in my short films, which helped me build confidence as a director. That experience gave me a lot of time to become comfortable with the topic, and I can talk about it much more easily now. That was the point from the beginning, not wanting to repress these feelings and experiences. I spent so long making those short films that I really, by the time I got to make the feature, I felt like I could really focus just on the craft.
There are some edits in this film that are so beautiful, where you feel like you’re in one moment, and then it reveals you’re actually different. Like when you think you’re watching the heron fly, but it’s actually Jeremy watching the heron fly on the TV. You do that a couple of times, where the edit unmoors the viewer.
I think I’m always interested in moments in films that upend your expectation of what you’re watching. Whose perspective is it? Where is the point of view coming from? I think that’s why I was excited about the structure: I could have just told the whole story from the past and watched this family come undone. But it was the perspective being switched from child to adulthood, which I experienced, and we all experience, that I found to be interesting. Because I could actually play with the expectations of the coming-of-age genre.
I think coming of age is not something that happens when you’re a child or a teenager; it happens when you’re an adult. Where you start to have self-awareness about your past and how it made you into the person you are. That’s my understanding of coming of age. I don’t think I really came of age until my twenties, when I started looking back on my past and understood why I became the person I am. The movie is, for me, as much about Jeremy and grief as it is about what makes a person who they are. I think I started to understand the obvious reasons why I became a filmmaker when I had that self-awareness.
There’s a scene where Jeremy’s making it snow with flour for his siblings while the Dad is taking photographs. When he is developing the film, he says, “Time is going backwards. It’s a time warp.” I love the way you incorporate film and photography, not only to capture time but also because an image can be an emotional time warp; you are then playing with all the different philosophical aspects of image-making. I’d love to hear how that’s part of you as an artist, and how it’s reflected in the film.
I love that you pointed out that scene, because I think it’s such an important moment. I think image-making is something I’m naturally drawn to because of my Dad and the way I grew up around someone who was always documenting everything around him, including me as a subject. So I think the photographic image became a part of my acknowledgement of reality, of that time existing. I think of documentation as a way of bearing witness to reality. Sometimes I really question my own reality and memories. I think photographs, the photographic image, feels like proof. My Dad has this huge archive of our family that proves that there was a time before everything happened that was so beautiful. Those images are so precious to me now.
When I made “Still Processing,” I was studying the photographic image, its impact, and how it depicts mortality. This has been written very eloquently by people far more academic than I, but it’s something I studied because I think it’s about the impact of seeing those images for the first time, for me, versus seeing the video images, and the video content was very different.
I think that’s why all of my films have been about characters who are obsessed with looking at the past and looking at old photographs, looking at old videos, and trying to come to terms with the past. I think “Blue Heron” is the first film where I finally feel it’s more about accepting than processing. Sasah comes to a place where she ultimately can’t do anything about the past anymore, and she’s just coming to a place of acceptance. The photographs thematically are part of that story.
When you come to accept the past, you still carry bits of it with you, right? For Sasha, there’s the blue heron keychain that Jeremy gave her, and she also has her mom’s evil eye in her car. So she’s carrying her whole family and that whole thing with her, even as she moves forward as a person.
You’re the first person to point out the evil eye. No one else has noticed that. We tried to infuse subtle inheritances. Things that she had from her past. She’s wearing a t-shirt that Jeremy wore earlier in the film when she’s making breakfast. These little things that were hand-me-downs or from her parents.
I really was trying to show, in her childhood, the things her parents were teaching her, and then, in the second half, you see them being applied. So she’s cooking with her mom as a kid, and then later, you see her making her own breakfast. Little parallels like that. Or in the first half of the film, you see the mom recording the conversation with the psychiatrist without his knowledge. Then Sasha does the same in the second half, using her iPhone while speaking with her parents. The dad literally handing her the camera is just a very literal metaphor of this being handed down to her.
So I was trying to show the ways that you are shaped by your circumstances, but also by your parents and who they are. I think a lot about nature versus nurture, especially in relation to my brother, who grew up in the same environment but had such different outcomes in our lives. I feel like I carry a lot of survivor’s guilt in that I wonder why my life turned out this way, and his turned out that way. He did have a different father, but we grew up in the same circumstances. It’s something I feel like I can’t help but grapple with.
That is why I wanted to show the siblings’ point of view. But it was important that I admitted this is not a depiction of this person. This is just a fragmented attempt to show what I experienced. Jeremy’s only line in the movie, pretty much, is just, “I think there are a lot of things you don’t remember.” I acknowledge that this is a surface-level, impressionistic view of a person. This character is so dissimilar from my brother. There’s no way I could even begin to depict my brother. So it’s just emotionally autobiographical, and unless it’s actually footage of him, it’s never going to be accurate.
I think that line is really perceptive, just from my experience. My brother is a little bit older, but I remember everything that I went through because I went through it. But he doesn’t remember very much. I feel like his mind helped him get through it by just putting it in a box. So whenever I’m still working through stuff, he’s like, “Why are you still thinking about this?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” It’s interesting how, with siblings, going through a lot of difficult emotions at a young age helps the body and mind develop coping mechanisms.
I thought about that a lot. I would write scenes that I had a vague memory of, but then I would speak to my parents, and they would say what I had written was so misremembered. They were like, “That’s not how that happened at all. It was much more extreme.” There were just variations, and I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t remember. Once I realized that, I decided it didn’t matter. It’s about what makes sense narratively and cinematically, and how I am going to depict it to move the story forward. It didn’t matter anymore if it was true or exactly how it happened, because if you honor that too much, then you’re creatively limiting yourself. So I just threw that out the window.
There are some needle drops in this film that are literally two of my favorite songs of all time. When King Crimson’s “I Talk To The Wind” came on, I gasped in the theater. But also “Some Things Last a Long Time” by Daniel Johnson at the end was just so beautiful. Every song by him makes me cry.
I could do a whole lecture on music supervision, because it’s so hard to find songs that you can even relatively afford. And music was so important to me. The entire atmosphere of the film stemmed from the diegetic music playing in the house. When I looked back at the videos my dad had taken, there was always music playing in the background that sounded like a musical score. So I tried to implement that in the film in the same way, where the music is coming from a source, and it’s not a musical score in the movie, but it creates the atmosphere of a musical score in the household. That was a big part of the dad’s character in the film. He’s always at a distance, but he’s creating an artistic atmosphere for the kids to live within.
So all the music was based more or less on my dad’s taste, which obviously became my own. I was talking a lot to my brother about things we remember Dad playing, and just how our tastes have all melded together. Like, I went to see the movie “The Devil and Daniel Johnson” with my parents in a theater. They loved Daniel Johnson as well. So I think all the music was little hidden love letters to my parents and acknowledgements of the impact that their tastes have had on me. Both of them are very artistic people who also love movies, and it had a big impact on me. But it was hard because it was very expensive, so we had to raise extra funds just for the music.
You bring a touch of quasi-documentary filmmaking to the scene with the social workers. I think one of the main things most people don’t have to grapple with, if they don’t have issues as a teenager, is the social services system. But having gone through it, I can say it’s a horrible system. I think it’s horrible everywhere. I don’t know why, I don’t know if there’s an answer. I like that you didn’t necessarily look for an answer. You just looked for various ways it can fail, or for the fact that there are so many variables in these kinds of situations that the system can’t cover them all.
It’s so complicated, and from a systemic perspective, we just do not have an answer. I think having grown up with a heavy presence of social services coming in and out of my house with different suggestions and solutions that never really brought any kind of relief to anybody, but also witnessing really caring, loving people who were trying to do their best within their limited roles, I really wanted to show that juxtaposition. The people within those systems are often well-intentioned, but within government systems and their limitations, all these things converge and create a very broken system where it’s so easy for people to fall through the cracks. I did so much research on social services and on psychology. I spoke to various experts while writing the script, and every single person said the same thing: there was no good answer for these things.
I even spoke to a specialist whose entire psychological research was around siblings who grew up with siblings who had extreme behavioral issues. That was his exact focus. He has a child who is very similar to my brother, who is like Jeremy. This is his entire focus, and yet, as a parent, it still happened in his family. I really wanted to show a very specific example of it, which is my own, but I know that it’s not that unique, you know? I think everyone feels isolated in their experiences. Parents, especially, feel very isolated in their experiences. They feel like they fucked up. They ask, “What did we do wrong?” And the system forces you to feel that way. Then, as someone like yourself, going through the system, you feel like you’re the scapegoat for the problems. It really is a problem that I think there is nowhere to really place the blame, except for potentially the government.
It was important to me that the social workers in the film were real social workers and experts, because I wanted them to speak for themselves, which is why we cast them. It wasn’t because I wanted a documentary aspect to the film. I need them to speak from their professional experience. I did a test shoot with social workers, and I played Sasha. We did the whole conversation, which ended with them saying, “Even now, twenty years later, we don’t have a much better response to this.” It was important that it was actually baked into the reality, not just me writing a script.
Your film is wonderfully empathetic with how the parents feel. Even though they’re trying to get help and social services are trying to help them, they still feel like they’re bad parents. She says social services thinks she’s a bad mom. When I was a teenager, I didn’t think that my parents felt like they were bad parents, but I realized when I got older, I was in foster care. Of course, they felt like they were bad parents. You have to get older to realize how your parents even felt about you growing up, let alone how you felt about your parents. I think this is a film that had to have been made when you were older, so that you could have that perspective. I’m glad you waited until you had that perspective, so that it could be a fuller portrait.
If I had made this when I was twenty-five, it would have been much more angry and confused and in the middle of everything. I think I needed the time and the space to actually make the film, not just emotionally, but artistically as well. Back then, it wouldn’t be as coherent. I think a lot of people are rushing to make their first feature before they’re thirty, or whatever, but I highly recommend making shorts until you feel you actually have something to say.
How do you hope people will feel when the film is over?
I hope they feel okay. I’ve been asked, “What do you want people to take from it?” But I don’t want people to feel a certain way. If they happen to feel moved by it, I hope they feel open to it and accepting of those feelings, however they choose to process them. It’s a very personal film that I think I’ve opened up to the world, and I made it with the hope that people could connect to it, and it’s so clear to me that this film is emotionally resonating with a lot of people, but it would be strange if it did that for everybody.
Were there any films by other women filmmakers that either inspired you or that you think not enough people have seen?
A film I only discovered while prepping this film, after a friend recommended it, was Martha Coolidge’s 1976 “Not A Pretty Picture.” I bring it up specifically because you said it’s underseen. It was only restored in 2022 and had such a small release. Watching it now, it’s crazy to me how much of an impact it clearly had, even somehow subconsciously, on so many filmmakers. It’s doing the hybrid techniques so elegantly, and it’s from fifty years ago. There are some films made before it that are hybrid, of course. But I think the way she’s balancing the fiction, the emotional catharsis, and the personal filmmaking is incredible.
I’m in a long line of women, specifically, who make work based on processing their pasts, especially within systemic harm and societal issues, using themselves as a vessel to discover those things. When I saw that film, it just made me feel like I was in conversation with a film that I had not even seen. It made me feel like there is something very specific and special about the way that women use film. There’s a whole history behind that, and it’s an honor to be in a historical conversation with these other films that, for some reason, women are drawn to making.
Coolidge’s film also helped me feel more confident in my own film’s structure. Because I think the way that she’s using cross-cutting makes a lot of sense for that movie, but it made me realize that what I was trying to do was actually different. I really wanted to show time being ripped away from someone. I think when you cross-cut, you actually cradle time, and you don’t have that same effect of time disappearing. That’s why I wanted to avoid cross-cutting between the two timelines. I wanted it to be a jarring bifurcation in the middle where you’re suddenly in adulthood. Sometimes it’s affirming to watch something you love, doing something in a way that affirms a decision to do the same thing differently.
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