International Feature Film Competition
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family move to Vancouver Island, hoping for a new start. But as her brother Jeremy’s erratic behaviour grows increasingly dangerous, the family’s fragile sense of peace begins to crumble. Years later, Sasha, now an adult, looks back through memories, home videos, and silence, seeking to make sense of what was lost. ‘Blue Heron’ is a tender, haunting meditation on family, memory, and the quiet distances between love and understanding.
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family move to Vancouver Island, hoping for a new start. But as her brother Jeremy’s erratic behaviour grows increasingly dangerous, the family’s fragile sense of peace begins to crumble. Years later, Sasha, now an adult, looks back through memories, home videos, and silence, seeking to make sense of what was lost. ‘Blue Heron’ is a tender, haunting meditation on family, memory, and the quiet distances between love and understanding.
Set in the late 1990s, ‘Blue Heron’ follows eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family as they begin again on Vancouver Island, searching for stability and a sense of home in unfamiliar surroundings. The small rituals of settling in gradually knit a fragile peace that is soon unsettled by the erratic behaviour of Sasha’s older brother, Jeremy. Years later, an adult Sasha looks back on those formative days and asks what tenderness survives upheaval. She returns to fragments of home videos, taped conversations, faded photographs, attempting to assemble a truthful picture from partial memories, hovering in the tender space between guilt and love, grief and care, what was lost and what remains.
Drawing from her own experience, writer-director Sophy Romvari crafts an intimately observed debut that delicately merges fiction and memory. The film embraces the natural textures of family life: awkward silences, sudden warmth, misunderstandings that bruise, and the small mercies that follow. Visually poetic and emotionally resonant, ‘Blue Heron’ dissolves the boundary between realism and recollection, letting image and feeling drift together like tides. Both haunting and humane, it is a quiet study of how we carry our families within us, even as time reshapes what we remember and how we heal.
Drawing from her own experience, writer-director Sophy Romvari crafts an intimately observed debut that delicately merges fiction and memory. The film embraces the natural textures of family life: awkward silences, sudden warmth, misunderstandings that bruise, and the small mercies that follow. Visually poetic and emotionally resonant, ‘Blue Heron’ dissolves the boundary between realism and recollection, letting image and feeling drift together like tides. Both haunting and humane, it is a quiet study of how we carry our families within us, even as time reshapes what we remember and how we heal.
