“I realised any attempt to replicate is going to be a failure”: Sophy Romvari on Blue Heron

Think of Blue Heron as a snow globe. Unhurried and nostalgic, Sophy Romvari’s semi-autobiographical debut lets you observe the intricacies of its self-contained world as if through a glass dome. In this story of a Hungarian-Canadian family undone by a disruptive son and the systems that fail him, there are conversations you never hear, behaviours you never understand and a tragedy you never see.

The film is also strikingly intimate, submerging us in the life of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven). We experience the late-1990s summer alongside her, cradled by the balmy boredom of her aimless days. That stasis is disrupted by the increasingly destructive behaviour of her teen brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). His patient but exasperated parents (Ádám Tompa and Iringó Réti) seek help from various professionals but rarely feel heard.

Just when the irregular rhythms of Sasha’s life begin to feel normal, Romvari tears us from the past and plonks us into the present. Adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker, is making a documentary to process her hazy memories of Jeremy, searching for answers like her parents did years earlier. A moment of magic brings her back to them and her childhood home, leading to a devastating meditation on our inability to alter the past.

When I spoke with Romvari, she was Zooming from her parents’ house in Vancouver, bringing it all back home. We discussed everything from time travel and Chantal Akerman to screwball comedies and the limits of filmmaking.

While Blue Heron often feels intimate, the viewer is kept at a distance from certain characters and moments…

It was important for me to find a creative distance from the topic. There are things that Sasha as a character or me as the author don’t have access to. So I wasn’t going to pretend that I had it, especially in depicting Jeremy as a character. He became, through the process of writing, production, and editing, a much more distant character. It was in making the film that I realised I was not going to be able to come anywhere close to representing my brother. I realised any sort of attempt to replicate is going to be a failure. 

Part of the process of making the film is realising that film as a medium, it has so much potential for exploring memory and grief through the visuals, but then you have this limitation of actually accessing those things. It’s like when you have a dream about someone who has passed away – you are able to access them momentarily, but it’s not real. Maybe once a year, I have a dream where I see my brother or both of my brothers, and I have a conversation with them, and it feels more real than any other dream, but then I wake up and I have to accept that it wasn’t. That’s very much how I feel about this film – it comes close to representing my experience and my family’s experience spiritually, but it’s also, at the same time, the tip of the iceberg. 

Why did you bookend the film with adult Sasha zooming in on the landscape on her iPhone? 

I wanted to highlight the fact that this is a contemporary film. This is a film taking place in the present day. Of course, there’s a large chunk of it that has taken place in the 1990s, but to me, the film is always present day because it’s from the perspective of contemporary understanding. The first half of the film, I see that as something that’s being shown in retrospect. So I wanted to root the film immediately in this contemporary landscape and then, of course, you forget. That’s the intention – you see the opening shot and you’re told this is going to be a story from the present day, but then you’re sucked into the past.

Did particular films influence the meta element in the second half?

One of my favourites is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm [1968], where it really roots you in this documentary narrative and then leaves you questioning what’s real. I love when a film brings you into an experience rather than just telling you a story. It asks you to dissect the construction as you are participating in the watching of it. That’s part of what I was trying to do with this film. That feeling of being ripped away from the past and then thrust into the future, or the present day, is something that I wanted to engage with the audience.

You’ve said that the scene in which the mother peels potatoes with young Sasha is an homage to Jeanne Dielman [1975]. How has Chantal Akerman shaped your sensibility as a filmmaker? 

That shot in particular was 100% a moment of dedication to her work and the way that she depicts women and labour. That moment is also showing a young girl coming to understand the weight of the world through her mother and the burden of what she’s going to inherit. So I liked the idea of this shot being almost identical to the shot in Jeanne Dielman, but then having a child rupture that frame. 

Jeanne Dielman exploded my mind as a 25-year-old starting to really get into cinephilia. I was thinking about the way that she uses time. She wants you to feel the time. She wants you to feel like you’re being dragged along on this experience and how draining it is, which ultimately is what gives you the feeling you have at the end. That really taught me about pacing. The film doesn’t feel long. It’s just that you’re in this feeling for so long. 

In one scene, we see adult Sasha in the bath watching His Girl Friday [1940]. Why that film?

His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films. It’s a film I used to teach students about dialogue and editing. It really is just a high example of what the craft can do. The reason that we use that film is because the rights lapsed and were not renewed. But that specific clip, I love that it’s about this journalist and she’s on a mission. So there’s a thematic connection as well as it being personal as well as it being available. A lot of the decisions you make when you make a low budget film, you try to have them be pragmatic as well as aesthetic and artistic. It’s the same thing with using a long zoom lens, there’s a pragmatic reason for it, but there’s also an artistic intention behind it. As much as I can, I try to marry these things because I’m working with so much limitation.

Beyond the fact that a blue heron keyring becomes talismanic in the film, does the titular bird have symbolic meaning?

I grew up on Vancouver Island, specifically in Nanaimo and on a really small island called Gabriola Island, and I was surrounded by the ocean. So much of my childhood was about being surrounded by nature. That nature became a very palpable and, honestly, easy metaphor for what this family is experiencing. The blue heron, metaphorically, is a bird that signifies the ability to stand on your own two feet without support. I liked that, but then as I leaned into the title, so many other metaphors came through naturally. We were using footage from a documentary that was made by the NFB [National Film Board of Canada] called The Great Blue Heron [1979], and the voiceover lent itself to the metaphor of this character who is migrationally leaving the nest and the parents having to detach themselves. 

When I watched your documentary short Still Processing [2020] and saw the photos and home video footage of your family, I was struck by the physical resemblance between them and the actors in Blue Heron, particularly the siblings. During the casting process, how much did likeness matter? I know that Edik Beddoes, who plays Jeremy, was street cast. 

It really is not even a needle in a haystack. It’s something smaller. I wanted Jeremy to stand out, but also to have some sort of connection between him and his mother. So there’s a lot of genetic casting that you have to do. We cast young Sasha first, but we basically had her on hold until we cast the parents to make sure whoever we cast could believably be her parents. So, part of it is aesthetic, but then a lot of it became about the chemistry between the characters and the actors. 

I had these ideas in mind, but there are certain things you have to let go of when you’re making autobiographical work. I’d rather pick a performer who is stronger than someone who looks more like the person I’m depicting. Iringó [Réti], who plays the mother, doesn’t look much like my mum at all. But she was by far the strongest performer and she brought such a depth to it. Rather than continuing the search, it was just like, what’s the point? You’re not really serving the story or the film anymore. You’re just serving your own ego and nostalgia. You have to draw a line because if you’re just only focusing on the factual, you’re going to end up alienating people.

What was it like to direct fictional versions of yourself?

Working with younger Sasha and adult Sasha, there was never a point at which I was like, how can they be more like me? This character became the goal. She’s embodying things about my life, but I don’t see myself when I watch this movie. I see this hybrid character of myself and the actors. There is a detachment for me. I’m never going to see the film as someone who doesn’t have a connection to the making of it, but I know it completely comes from within the deepest, deepest parts of me. Little Sasha would often come up to me on set, and she would hug me and say, “I’m you!” [Laughs] Of course, that must be healing on some level, but I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms. 

What was important for you in capturing how the world feels to a child?

Very early on, I decided that I wasn’t going to be dogmatic about camera placement or what she sees or what she hears. I show things that are outside of that because to me it’s not strictly the point of view of a child. It’s also retroactive. It’s also potentially a creation that is being made by this adult character. But I think keeping it in the child’s point of view is important in terms of not imbuing young Sasha with an adult sense of the world. I wanted to make sure that that’s something that I was saving for later in the film, this understanding. So, what she sees is that this is normal. She knows something is off, but to her, this is her normal. 

That’s why so much of the film is rooted in her just feeling bored and frustrated. I think that’s true to the childhood experience. You just feel like, ‘Well, that’s annoying. I was making latkes, now I’m not, what the fuck?’ [Laughs] She also still has this quality of observationalism. She’s wise beyond her years in certain moments, like when she falls in the pool and lies to her mum about it, because she doesn’t want to cause more problems. That’s how you absorb these things around you as a child. The atmosphere was very important in terms of what you remember as a kid. You remember the sounds and the smells and the boredom. That was an era, one of the last, where boredom is really captured in the period, because we were not being constantly distracted. 

The first half of Blue Heron made me think of other recent films by women about childhood – Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 (2017), Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022), Annie Baker’s Janet Planet (2023)… 

I’m so curious, why are there so many films by women about their childhoods that explore time? It’s incredible to me that that is such an instinct that women have. Men do too, but I think that men maybe have more layers of metaphor or there’s more separation or we just don’t talk about it in the same way. Men make films that are deeply personal all the time. Tarkovsky’s Mirror [1975], for example, is a deeply personal film and shows him as a child. Or The 400 Blows [1959]. And we don’t think of these films as autobiographical in the same way.

You could call it a time travel movie. How did you land on those time warp elements?

I really wanted to play with the idea of having the ability to move through time and then not be able to affect the outcome. That was the whole pitch and purpose of this movie: look at this incredible thing that this character gets to do, and still nothing changes. It’s quite nihilistic in some ways. You want there to be an outcome that benefits the characters, but I’m a realist. I wanted to show the artistic exploration, but then cut short the emotional catharsis because it’s not a rescue mission that she goes on. If anything, it’s a research mission. Oftentimes when you do research, you don’t find what you’re looking for.

► Blue Heron streams on Mubi from 18 September.