The début feature from a writer-director who has received praise for her many short films, Blue Heron became one of the most acclaimed films of the first half of 2026 when it opened in North America in April 2026. It had already gained a high profile among critics after its screening at Toronto in September 2025 and now it has a UK release with similarly strong critical support. Sophy Romvari was born in 1990 in Vancouver. Her siblings and parents had migrated from Hungary in 1989. She had been trying to explore her memories of growing up in a loving family in which the eldest of her three brothers had a difficult time as a teenager. She finally decided to make a film which offers a fictionalised account of those memories. The film’s title appears to refer to both a blue heron seen on a broadcast of a National Film Board documentary and possibly a small figure of a bird given by the eldest of the three boys to his young sister.

Mum takes the children out to explore in one of the long shots that here emphasises Jeremy’s separation from the others

Outline (no spoilers)

The film opens with the arrival of a family at an empty house close to the coast of Vancouver Island. Gradually we are introduced to the parents and four children of the family and the central character (or rather the narrator) quickly emerges as eight-year old Sasha. The two middle children appear to be twins and they have a close relationship but Sasha (Eylul Guven) and the oldest boy Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) are distinct individuals. Mother (Iringó Réti) takes the children out exploring the coastline of their new home while father (Ádám Tompa) works on a desktop computer and also uses an analogue still camera and a video camera to capture images of his family during what appears to be the long summer holidays. The technology used suggests we are in the late 1990s. It soon becomes apparent that 14 year-old Jeremy is becoming an increasingly disturbed young man and that the family will become involved with local police and social workers as his behaviour becomes more disruptive. Sasha observes events closely. In the second half of the narrative some twenty years later, Sasha is a young filmmaker who, it appears, has decided to make a film about what happened to her brother. This may be the most difficult part of the narrative for a general audience as the older Sasha then tries to imagine herself back in the family home as a young child. Suddenly the narrative becomes enigmatic. Is Sasha actually visiting the old house and imagining/remembering what it was like then? Are these images of memory or projections of grief, regret or perhaps even understanding?

Sasha (Eylul Guven) with her father’s videorecorder
Sasha discovers Jeremy (Edik Beddoes)
Sasha with her Mum (Iringó Réti)

Commentary

This is a very beautiful film – not just because of the beauty of Vancouver Island but also because of the performances, the meticulous production design and the cinematography. Some audiences may well be puzzled by the second part of the film and also frustrated by the ending but others will be too busy feeling the emotion and empathising with Sasha. This is one of those films in which ‘nothing happens’ and ‘everything happens’. It is what would once have been described as a ‘very rich text’ and I confess that I want to see it again and probably a third time to properly appreciate Romvari’s achievement. Oddly enough, I was reminded of two other films both made by relatively young women who drew inspiration directly from their own family experience growing up. Sarah Polley, one of Canada’s leading ‘actors turned directors’, made Stories We Tell (Canada 2012) and Dominga Sotomayor made Too Late to Die Young (Chile 2018). Both these films share elements with Blue Heron. Beyond the simple fact that all three women draw on their own experience, there is also the fact that, in different ways, they create young women with distinct ‘agency’ and that they show great imagination in dealing with memories and thinking through how to present them. If you haven’t seen either of these two films I recommend them highly and the three together might make a wonderful study weekend. Sophy Romvari has also mentioned Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (UK-US 2022) which again is a partly autobiographical film from the perspective of the memories of a young girl about a holiday with her father.

Sasha as the filmmaker (played by Amy Zimmer) crossing to Vancouver Island on the ferry

Both Sotomayor and Sophy Romvari won prizes at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival which looks for outstanding work from new international filmmakers. Success at Locarno in August sets up a higher profile for Toronto in September, the major platform for festival films in North America. This then means that such films get plenty of press coverage. In the case of Blue Heron, the impact has been so great that Sophy Romvari has been interviewed again for the Locarno Festival website in 2026 and you can read the interview here. Blue Heron has now been screened at fifty festivals worldwide. The film’s sales agent More Than Films includes Press Notes on its website and you can read an interview with the Sophy Romvari. In discussing the film’s visuals she praises her production designer Victoria Furuya and her costume designer Maria Katarina in terms of their dedication in finding ways to dress the house and clothe the characters authentically for the late 1990s and stay within the small budget. Similarly she talks in interesting ways about the cinematography and what her DoP Maya Bancovich brought to the production:

We shot with a giant zoom lens; I looked at a lot of Altman during pre-production, the way he lands on objects through zooms that carry you from one story beat to the next. The long lens made for a very dynamic feeling; we had movement without having to physically move the camera (which also helps with time and budget.) It became a game for us, it was addicting to see how efficient we could be with single shots. Maya was able to lock into my gaze so radically, it really was a life changing experience as a filmmaker. That’s the Platonic ideal with a cinematographer.

I confess to be so wrapped up in the characters and the situation that I didn’t notice the ‘Altmanesque’ moments but in a way that proves the point. Romavari refers to Charlotte Wells and Aftersun and she makes the interesting observation that: “There is something in the zeitgeist where millennials are looking back at their lives now that they’re in their 30s, and there’s a technological aspect to it—reintegrating those analogue textures”.

Erik Beddoes as Jeremy – an astonishing performance from an inexperienced actor

Blue Heron is a wonderful film and I’m so glad I managed to see it on a big screen. I don’t suppose Trump will ever see it – it would probably make him apoplectic. But if you enjoy living in a multi-racial and ethnically diverse society this is a film to gladden your heart. Among the cast and crew there are people of Hungarian, Romanian, Kyrgyz, Japanese and Turkish heritage as well as Brits and Americans on this very Canadian shoot and, as several commentators suggest, it’s great to see Vancouver playing itself and not some generic American city in a Hollywood film. I hope you can get to see it but in the UK it was released on just 25 screens by the independent distributor Conic. I’ve nothing against the distributor which looks after a wide range of independent films but I wish the film had more exposure. In the US it is distributed by Janus/Criterion so it has perhaps been more visible. Here’s a trailer: