Waterford Film for All Presents – Blue Heron

Waterford Film for All Presents – Blue Heron

Vancouver Island in the 1990s. Eight-year-old Sasha’s parents have moved their family fromHungary to Canada. As Sasha and her siblings enjoy the new environment, their parents have become increasingly concerned about the unpredictable behaviour of their eldest son Jeremy. As the parents desperately try to help their troubled son, Sasha struggles to understand what’s unfolding around her – an uncertainty she will revisit as an adult when she works on a deeply personal filmmaking project.

This extraordinary film from Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari is a quietly devastating reckoning with a family’s traumatic past. Using several inventive structural and narrative devices, Blue Heron emerges as one of the most accomplished and moving feature debuts of recent times.

Reviews

“Blue Heron juggles painful memoir and self-reflexive film-making with remarkable assurance… A surgically precise and poignant exploration of how families mythologise and editorialise the pain away.” -Tara Brady, The Irish Time

“Occasionally, a talent arrives fully formed, and the Canadian-Hungarian director Sophy Romvari is one such phenomenon… She is already effortlessly fluent in the language of cinema.” – Wendy Ide, The Observe

Awards

Winner – First Feature Award, Locarno Film Festival 2025

Winner – Best Canadian Discovery, Toronto Film Festival 2025

This film qualifies for the Friends Membership Film Pass. Not a friend yet? Find out more.