Blue Heron

Sophy Romvari is a Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker based in Toronto. She has directed more than ten short movies, including Still Processing which premiered at Toronto Film Festival in 2020. Blue Heron, her feature debut, was selected in Cineasti del Presente at Locarno.

A word from the selection committee:
A clue lies in the opening credits of Sophy Romvari’s first feature – this hand-drawn map: we will have to hike, to accurately measure and locate. While so many filmmakers, in trying to recover their childhood, end up turning their films into an attempt at taxidermy, we should see here how seamlessly the camera moves through her bubbles of memory; at times seeming to probe a secret, roaming through the sets, using large frames or extreme close-ups, often shooting through obstacles or elements that obstruct the frame. It breathes a wild vitality, the very life that will contend with the winds of madness blowing through Jérémy’s mind. One already admires the precision of the autofictional gesture, and it is doubled by a more reflective, meta gesture, which conveys with unexpected grace, the emotional distance that certainly already exists when one cannot penetrate the distress of a loved one. Blue Heron manifests a rare intelligence – inseparable from the resigned sadness of the oracles. 

Victor Bournerias