Canadian director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, Blue Heron, will have its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.Felix Rapp/Supplied
Memory is photochemical. Over time, under certain lights, details fade or concretize in our minds. We might recall minor sounds or smells, but are liable to forget entire scenes; we dig gaps, rewrite things and build subjective histories in order to soothe ourselves. Concentrate hard enough and the memory might play like a movie, with cuts, fades and selective audio.
Sculpting the barbs of memory into art is not as easy as that, as Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari knows, having just made the most moving film of the year. Her autobiographical debut feature, Blue Heron, considers, with emotional rigour and a gentle gaze, how to build understanding out of images. After a buzzy world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival this month, where Romvari received the First Feature Award, Blue Heron will land in Canada for its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
A Canadian-Hungarian co-production, the film begins with an act of migration: In the late 1990s, a family of six, including three sons and a daughter, immigrate to Vancouver Island from Hungary. Told predominantly through the perspective of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), Blue Heron follows this family in crisis as the reticent teenage son, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), exhibits increasingly distressing behavioural issues.
Unable to make sense of or mitigate Jeremy’s actions – irritability, disappearing, shoplifting, playing dead on the front steps – their parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) turn to the hollow advice of therapists, who cannot pin down a diagnosis and instead suggest they ignore him until he gets bored. Despite his confounding demeanour, which ping-pongs between gracefully detached and irascible, Jeremy has threatened substantive harm to himself and his family. “He’s troubled but not crazy,” insists his mother.
Meanwhile, saucer-eyed Sasha is gradually becoming aware of how her older brother is perceived, not only by strangers, but by her careworn parents. Their father, when not planted in front of the family computer for work, intimately and meticulously documents the four children through monochrome photography and camcorder footage. The younger boys cheerfully distract themselves with games while Sasha absorbs her father’s way of looking through cameras – a meta annotation of Romvari’s own filmmaking.
“My inspiration, emotionally and artistically, is my parents. They really cared about art above all else, but, as immigrants, were not practising artists. I absorbed a lot of their aesthetic desires as a kid,” Romvari says in an interview. “My mom used to say there’s no movie that gets at what we went through, and that planted a seed in me very young to make the movie that she wished existed then.” She adds that the most satisfying moment of her life was sharing the film with them in their living room.
Sophy Romvari on the set of Blue Heron. Romvari says she doesn’t have a good memory, so filmmaking has become a way of ‘recapturing,’ ‘replacing’ or ‘validating’ her past experiences.Robb McCaghren/Supplied
Shot by Maya Bankovic, whose cool-toned natural landscapes resemble an old photograph, Blue Heron reconstructs and fictionalizes Romvari’s own childhood. “It’s more a myth than a paint-by-numbers version of my life,” she notes. “The film is about memory but it’s also about inability to remember. It’s an admission of not being able to change the past.”
Romvari confesses that she does not have a good memory and that filmmaking has become about “recapturing something and replacing the memory, or, at least validating the fact that it happened.” This theme of grief surfacing amid creation has lined many of Romvari’s past short films. In her acclaimed 2020 documentary Still Processing, the director discovers and develops a box of unseen family photos, watching the contours of her late siblings’ faces slowly emerge within the images.
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Similarly, Blue Heron sees the fictionalized family pack into a makeshift darkroom, while the father, mesmerized, reveals both the structure and ethos of the film through a developing photograph: “Time is going backwards. It’s a time warp.” Halfway through the film, Romvari boldly cleaves the narrative in two, creating a feeling akin to time travel, or resurrection, with a matured, but nevertheless unresolved lens.
In the present day, a filmmaker (Amy Zimmer) reflects on the fraught conditions of her family’s past, seeking retroactive guidance from real-life social workers to grasp at what could have been done differently. Romvari even wrote a predictive “script” for what the professionals might say. “I’ve heard Nathan Fielder does this with The Rehearsal,” she laughs.
Primarily told from the perspective of an 8-year-old girl, Blue Heron follows an autobiographical story about a Hungarian-Canadian immigrant family, whose teenage son begins exhibiting behavioural issues.Robb McCaghren/Supplied
Romvari’s assured direction is bolstered by the seemingly ambient details of the production: Péter Benjámin Lukács’s sound design, which crinkles and swells while also eluding certain dialogue to suit a child’s POV; Victoria Furuya’s period production design, including a shell of a nineties computer retrofitted with an LCD screen; costume designer Maria Katarina’s baggy, earth-toned silhouettes; and Kurt Walker’s deft editing, which collapses the here-and-now and the past.
The reception in Locarno felt enormous – atypical of independent Canadian features, let alone debuts. During the screening, the crowd was moved to a collective sob in one heart-wrenching sequence. Patrons handed each other tissues; the moderator of the Q&A briefly spoke through tears. Though I was not seeing the film for the first time, I wiped my cheeks with a pair of socks from the bottom of my purse.
The picture of the past is incomplete, and, rather than colour it with assumptions, Romvari affectionately traces its edges. “I’ve spent the last decade of my career thinking about what makes personal work accessible to others, and what qualities keep audiences at an arm’s length,” she reflected after the premiere.
“The reaction to Blue Heron has far exceeded even my wildest expectations. The emotional response is striking, and I can only say that I think audiences are looking for permission to feel, and I’m honoured to provide that space.”
Blue Heron screens at TIFF on Sept. 9, Sept. 10 and Sept. 12.
Special to The Globe and Mail
