“If you can’t handle disorienting moments, maybe you shouldn’t be watching movies”: Sophy Romvari on Locarno prize-winner Blue Heron

To nod to the title of one of her short films, Sophy Romvari is still processing how best to sell her latest film, Blue Heron, to prospective audiences. “Ideally people can go in not really knowing anything,” she tells me in sweltering August heat in Locarno, a few days before winning the Swiss festival’s First Feature Award. “When people ask me what the film is about, it’s like, oh, it’s a family drama with some narrative time twist.” 

That description does undersell the movie a bit, but Romvari seems right to suggest that editing a trailer for her festival darling will prove difficult. Much of her lyrical film’s knockout emotional punch is tied to disorienting formal gambits that come far into the 90-minute runtime, once viewers have long settled into the particular rhythms of her observational portrait of a family in crisis. In keeping with maintaining the mystery, all you need to know about the plot beforehand is as follows.

In the 1990s, two Hungarian immigrants (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) in Canada move their four children to Vancouver Island. The eldest child, teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), exhibits increasingly disruptive, dangerous and self-destructive behaviour in this new environment, as witnessed largely – though not exclusively – through the perspective of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven). Opening narration from an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) establishes that these events are being revisited through the imperfect lens of hazy recollections. “Thank you for the memories,” Sasha says at the start. “They’re all I have now.”

Blue Heron is Romvari’s first feature as writer-director, but since the mid-2010s the Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker’s body of short-length work, which often explores ideas of fragmented identities, has garnered her very vocal fans across the world, including the programmers of the Criterion Channel in North America, who celebrated her with an eight-film series years before Blue Heron was shot. In her first feature, she fictionalises her childhood and the struggles of her parents and troubled older sibling, as both remembered and captured on camcorder at the time.

Many of your shorts are fiction-documentary hybrids, and then Blue Heron is a fiction feature that’s partly about a documentary filmmaker. I’m curious what a documentarian might have captured in following you during the making of this.

One might assume that because it’s an emotionally heavy film, that it was an emotionally heavy thing to endeavour through. But it was honestly a really fun time, from the prep through to production and then definitely through post. And I feel it’s an insane privilege to get to make a film at all; to have an incredible, very small crew of people rallying around you to help support your vision, who believed that what I was doing would work out and make sense, in a way that’s so pure.

On a script level, the structure is a little bit of a risk. Or rather, I was told by some financiers that the structure takes a leap that could be a challenge for audiences. Now that the film is being seen, I’m not getting that sense from anybody. Of course, [the structural pivot] is a disorienting moment, but if you can’t handle disorienting moments, maybe you shouldn’t be watching movies. [laughs]

When did you settle on the film’s title?

I had recently bought this stained-glass blue heron that I was hanging in my window, and immediately was convinced that should be the title of the film. There was no narrative reason, but then I wrote it into the script, so that title came first and the reason came after. It became this structural point of the movie; that this object is integral to the spanning across time. And the way that I inserted it into the narrative was loosely inspired by Celine and Julie Go Boating [1974]. I don’t want to spoil too much of Blue Heron, but in Celine and Julie candy leads to time travel, essentially.

What were you looking for when casting your parents?

I try not to think about it like casting my parents. I was trying to find a family that felt cohesive and real. We actually cast the younger Sasha first because she was an undeniable discovery. And then the parents were cast through my Hungarian casting director, and it was an extensive process of trying to find the best Hungarian actors who also were English-speaking but also had good chemistry, and then also would align with the general genetic landscape that we were trying to build. There were many little puzzle pieces that had to come together, but it was their chemistry read that really was undeniable.

And what of casting Amy Zimmer as the adult Sasha for the film’s later stages?

Amy was definitely a needle in a haystack. Not only because I was looking for someone who I felt could take on a heavy emotional performance, but also someone who was willing to risk a bit of vulnerability through the process of how those scenes are shot. Amy was really game to do that. And she has a comedic background, predominantly. I think that level of improvisation and intelligence allowed her to do that, which was amazing.

I feel emotional watching her performance, but not because I’m like, “Oh, she played me so well.” It’s more like she did something that I think she didn’t even know she was capable of, and that’s very moving to me. And she was truly empathetic in a way that I think is rare to find in an actor. She felt the empathy of the character, and of me and of my family, of the story, and put it all into the [performance].

Do you view making an autofiction work like Blue Heron as a way of healing?

I don’t think you can use filmmaking to heal in a way that’s conclusive. It’s a way to process and digest experiences in your life that I think is very helpful, because it allows you to create distance from them but also to witness them. And I think witnessing is a big part of processing our pasts and sharing those experiences with other people. I do believe that it’s a powerful tool as a filmmaker, but also as someone who watches films and gets a lot out of experiencing other people’s lives and experiences through film. The process of making this was less about healing and more about accepting, and moving on as well.

Blue Heron screens at the 69th BFI London Film Festival.