Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Keep It Close:
An Interview with Sophy Romvari, director of Blue Heron
By Leonardo Goi

Sophy Romvari’s astonishingly assured feature debut, Blue Heron, begins with a confession: “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood.” The words are Sasha’s, a young woman trying to piece those memories back together. Like Romvari, she is a Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants who moved to suburban Vancouver in the 1990s; also like the writer-director, she lost her older brother to a mental illness and is still grappling with the tragedy. Such autobiographical echoes are nothing novel for Romvari, whose previous shorts were all fueled by a desire to unearth and make peace with her own family history. Grandma’s House (2019) sent the director to Budapest to locate traces of her late grandmother in the woman’s empty flat; Remembrance of József Romvári (2020) stitched together a tribute to her grandfather, a production designer, through archival footage and photos; in Still Processing (2020), Romvari teared up while opening a treasure trove of previously unseen family mementos.

Blue Heron doubles as another personal archaeology, though Romvari here recruits two actresses as her stand-in: Eylul Guven plays eight-year-old Sasha, and Amy Zimmer her adult version. The film is a diptych, the first part concerned with young Sasha’s attempts to settle in the new turf, as well her family’s struggles with her stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a laconic teenager with a history of self-destructive tantrums. The boy’s precise condition is something Romvari never spells out, and her film is too compassionate to make a spectacle out of him. Jeremy remains a mystery, even after Blue Heron abandons its coming-of-age trappings to become something else entirely, catapulting us several years into the future to follow thirtysomething Sasha, now a director trying to make a film to help process her brother’s death.

Filmmaking as therapy is another prominent motif in Romvari’s oeuvre, but what’s especially remarkable about Blue Heron is the way its form literalizes the impossibility to fully remember those days. Shot by Maya Bankovic, the film is seen and told from Sasha’s perspective; time and again, the camera lingers outside windows and door frames, with dramatic zooms pushing in on the rooms the girl is barred from. Romvari makes up for those gaps with a near forensic attention to the myriad details of Sasha’s childhood—all the sounds, clothes, toys, and TV programs of her youth—and there are moments when the camera seems to move like a dowser’s rod, scanning those textures for answers. That adult Sasha finds none doesn’t stop Romvari from granting her some catharsis. As Blue Heron wraps, past and present magically intersect, an epilogue that’s all the more poignant for the emotional restraint the film embodies throughout.

I met Romvari the day after Blue Heron premiered in Locarno last August; we spoke about filmmaking as a means to heal, the ethical dimensions of digging up private family stories, and the ways in which technology can help rescue those memoriesfrom oblivion.

Reverse Shot: I’m happy I got to revisit your shorts in preparation for Blue Heron, because your debut feature strikes me as the culmination of a long and ongoing journey straddling fiction and personal history.

Sophy Romvari: You're right: Still Processing was already a culmination of some kind, and Blue Heron definitely is one, too. I made shorts for quite a while, and I think I was trying to find my voice through them. But this feature is much more exemplary of what I feel. This is my voice now. Whereas with the shorts I was experimenting a lot more and trying to find ways to get a point across quickly and efficiently. They were great lessons, and they all helped me hone my instincts, which made this film the most intentional thing I've ever made. But they were not as aesthetically driven as Blue Heron is. I find this film to be much truer to how I want my work to feel and look.

RS: Was there a specific image or memory that triggered the whole story in motion?

SR: To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories. I tried to cover a lot of ground here: his story, my family’s, and the reflection of that now… I knew that this was a period of my life that I really wanted to explore, but I had a lot of difficulty remembering it, and I was really interested in trying to uncover and unpack that through cinema.

RS: How much of Blue Heron was scripted, and how much was improvised? I’m thinking about the scene where adult Sasha sits down with the social workers: their interactions feel so natural it’s hard to imagine them as written out beforehand.

SR: It was actually very important to me that the film was structured and scripted as much as possible prior to the shoot. I started writing the script in 2021 and was determined to understand what the film was before we went on set, because to make a feature is such a privilege, and I really wanted to understand what my intentions were. I didn't want to find out in the edit, or to fix things in postproduction or whatever. I wanted to know what the structure was. And I think the structure is what is interesting about the film. Had it just been a coming-of-age drama, had I continued with that past the halfway point, I don't know that I could have gotten much more out of it. It’s the split that I was really interested in exploring—these two perspectives, Sasha going back. That was very intentionally written. Even the scene with the social workers. I wrote what I imagined they would be saying because I’d done so much research beforehand. I’d spoken to a psychologist who focuses on siblings of people who grew up with severe mental disorders, on the impact of having been raised in that environment. I did a lot of academic research, and generally understood what was going to be said, which in a nutshell was: we still don’t have good answers. Basically, what you see in the film was already outlined and scripted. I had also shot a test version of that sequence with real social workers in which I played the lead character. All of this because I wanted to make sure the scene wasn’t just like this meandering, docu-style thing. In the end we shot with the social workers for three hours; it’s a six-minute scene so we had to boil it down to the essentials. And to have Amy play that part was such a brave challenge.

RS: Early into Still Processing, you use a subtitle to deliver what might well go down as the short’s tagline: “There are things that cannot be said aloud.” I kept thinking about those words all through Blue Heron. I was wondering about the ethical dilemmas you must have wrestled with as you worked on this new project.

SR: Still Processing was a very long deliberation between myself and my parents. I had begun my master's with my thesis project already outlined, but as I say in the short, it took a long time for my parents to understand what my intentions were. I think they felt a lot of guilt and blame and judgment over what happened; losing a child is the worst possible thing someone can go through. I’m not sure they understood how I could make a film without it being about that. But when I finally showed it to them they realized I wasn’t trying to expose anyone. If anything, the film was something closer to a memorial; it was a gesture of love towards my parents and brothers. I just wanted to acknowledge our experience. And I think I gained a lot of trust from them through the process, and that trust has granted me some degree of artistic freedom. My parents are both very creative people and huge inspirations behind the style of this movie. The cinematography and the naturalism of the performances—these are things I learned through their taste. But Blue Heron was not made in collaboration with them. They did not see the script, for one thing—there were strict boundaries around this. I flew to Vancouver to show them the final cut, and that was the first time they saw it. They were very, very moved.

RS: You mentioned you wanted to avoid turning the film into some kind of meandering, documentary-adjacent project, but there are moments in Blue Heron where your observational approach and the naturalism you draw from your actors’ performances nudge the film in that direction. What attracts you about this liminal area between documentary and fiction? And how do you feel about these labels being applied to your work?

SR: I hate all those terms! [Laughs] We actually decided not to label the film as some docu-fiction hybrid here on the festival circuit because I’d much rather allow people to imagine what it might be for themselves. It’s not my job to pigeonhole it in any way. I think that documentary, much like fiction, can be very contrived and controlled. All I do is use some documentary methods to create an environment in which you can solicit naturalistic performances. And these social workers understood the assignment. My producer, Sara Wylie, had interviewed each of them individually. She told them the background story—my family’s case, basically—about my work as a filmmaker, and how this project was hoping to uncover what my family had gone through. And they understood that this was like a role play. I think we underestimate how easily people can throw themselves into a new environment. So we gathered them all in a room—my film undergrad staff room!—and Amy conducted the conversation. I knew that the best way to get naturalistic performances from the social workers was to have them play themselves. And I wanted the information that they provided to be true and honest as opposed to just scripted. I wanted it to be based on their professional experience. Because I think Blue Heron lives and dies on the authenticity of what can and cannot be done in a situation like this. If I just went, “Oh, I did the research, nothing can be done to help Jeremy, I'm just gonna script that,” I don't think it would have had the same impact as actually hearing professionals address those issues. It was sort of like obtaining an admission from a societal structure that we all rely on. And I wanted it to come from them, and to be somewhat held accountable as a society. As if his fate was a structural flaw, basically.

RS: Was there ever a moment when you thought you might play Sasha yourself? You’d already starred in Still Processing and several of your previous shorts.

SR: Well, Still Processing was my thesis film. And the central question there was, can you use filmmaking as a means of processing trauma? And as the traumatized person, the bereaved, I was using myself as a conduit for that academic experiment. That’s something I’d really like to teach eventually—this idea of using filmmaking as a sort of acknowledgment of grief or trauma. I think it's very powerful in its ability to allow you to accept different realities, to reflect back your own and have other people reflect on it, too. I used myself as that conduit because I felt comfortable with exploiting myself that way. The whole concept of the movie was me seeing those photographs for the first time, so I just genuinely allowed that to be what it was. And if I was able to pull it off it’s because I grew up with a camera around me all the time. But I think it does rub up against a lot of people’s willingness to accept that authenticity. I know a lot of people are like, “Why would you put a camera on yourself to cry?” I understand that’s uncomfortable for some people to witness, and I don't begrudge that as a response. But I know my intentions; I know that what I was trying to depict was an authentic experience. It was something that I just needed to do, that I wanted to do, for artistic but also emotional reasons. And when it came to Blue Heron, I also just really wanted to direct, to be honest. If I love this movie so much that’s in big part because I’m not watching myself. I could have been in this, but I’m so glad I’m not. I’m not an actor—I have limitations—and I’m so proud of and impressed by Amy’s work. I just think Blue Heron is an exponentially better film with her.

RS: Did you rehearse much with Amy Zimmer?

SR: We kind of Persona-ed! [Laughs] She had to be very vulnerable and open to some unusual work, because she had the most open-ended character and performance given the structure of the social worker conversation. Actually, both social worker conversations, because the woman she speaks with over Zoom in another scene is also a real social worker. That might not be evident in the film, but she was my family’s social worker and followed me as a child. I reconnected with her and caught her up on our lives. Last I saw her, I was about seven or eight; I told her everything that had happened to me since. She was so moved by the project that she agreed to participate in it. And she had this unscripted conversation with Amy, in which she referred to all my family members by character name. Again, people are really willing to go there if you give them a context to role play within. And the authenticity of what she was able to speak to was really important to capture as well. But Amy had to be rehearsed: I gave her lots of family documents, psychological reports. I had a sort of shared journal with her where I uploaded thoughts and videos and voice messages. I even curated a screenings series for her.

RS: What did that include?

SR: I called it Subtle Women Cinema. It was all about women who listen, document, and try to unearth things. There was Justine Triet’s Sybil [2019], Secrets & Lies [1996], Not a Pretty Picture [1976], Domestic Violence [2001], and The Eternal Daughter [2022]. It was like a very small syllabus. She watched those and was able to empathize with the experience by drawing from her own life, too. But Amy’s a sketch comedy actor—she’s worked for Adult Swim, starred in films like Problemista [2023] and Stress Positions [2024]. This is her first dramatic role.

RS: There are so many screens, so many cameras in Blue Heron, with characters zooming in on pictures as if to prod them for answers. What kind of role do these devices play within your family archaeologies?

SR: My dad studied cinematography and has an incredible eye for photographing human faces. He filmed and photographed us all the time; I think I might have seen maybe five percent of the entire family archive. He began with an analog camera, switched to video, and finally began recording on his iPad. It was like a constant documentary. I don’t trust my memory very much; I do a lot of journaling and recording so I can go back and check, because I can often twist my own memories into worst-case scenarios or whatever. It helps me to keep the story straight. And I think photographs, for me, are sort of surrogate for memories. I’m still processing all this. Susan Sontag talked about the death of an image, and how that death plays out in photographs versus video footage, when you might feel like there’s still life and possibility. And I tried to play with that in this film as well—to create these family archives within the film itself, the still photographs and the home video footage. All of which was obviously created. But in terms of the technology, I think the reason you see so many screens is because of this desperate desire to connect, remember, and hold on. A lot of my relationship with my parents has been through digital. I've been long distance from them a lot, and much of it was just talking over Skype—we speak almost every day. I just find technology as a means of connecting to be very useful and dependable. And I'm definitely not one of those filmmakers who's afraid to put iPhones or laptops in their movies; it's just how we communicate and how I feel connection to people.

RS: Speaking of other “intrusions,” I’d be curious to hear more about the films that crop up within your films. In Blue Heron, there’s a scene when Sasha watches His Girl Friday [1940] from her bathtub—but there are lots of similar moments all throughout your filmography, like when Deragh Campbell’s character watches Meet Me in St. Louis [1944] in Let Your Heart Be Light [2016].

SR: That’s all autobiographical: I get a lot of comfort from cinema, and the scene where she’s watching a film while taking a bath, that’s just something I do all the time! His Girl Friday became public domain just last year; it’s one of my favorite movies, so that was very lucky, plus in the clip Rosalind Russell is on this sort of journalistic mission herself: she’s uncovering the truth while trying to find her own place in the world. And I like to put filmmakers into my movies, but have them not just always making films but engaging with film more broadly. My entire worldview was shaped by my cinephilia.

RS: Blue Heron is tethered to Sasha’s imperfect POV. We see the world through her eyes, meaning we don’t have access to the whole picture, and the camera seems to heighten that impossibility, often lingering outside door frames and windows. Hence the dramatic zooms that suggest the girl’s desperate urge to know more. How did you and cinematographer Maya Bankovic arrive at those choices?

SR: Maya and I became one gaze, which I think is really rare… [Pauses]We did a lot of camera and lens tests, and we knew we were searching for this very organic look. We also knew we were never going to move the tripod but still wanted the image to feel dynamic. So these zoom lenses became integral to creating that suspense without the camera ever moving like a dolly. We also knew we were going to shoot digitally, that we weren't going to try and trick people into thinking it was film but would still have a nice texture to it. I’ve referenced Altman as a sort of inspiration—this feels so far away from this work, obviously! But he does use these master shot zoom lenses very efficiently. That was one of the references that we were looking at: this ability to capture so much. It became like a bit of a running challenge for us. How can we fit all this into one shot? The scene at the seaside, for instance, when the kids are sleeping in the car and the mother is on the beach and approaches through the window—we were always trying to find ways to film all that from one position without having to cover everything traditionally.

RS: Did you storyboard a lot?

SR: No, we didn't. We shot-listed and generally knew which lenses we were going to be shooting on, but we did not storyboard.

RS: Could you speak about the music? I was particularly fascinated by the inclusion of Brian Eno’s “An Ending” and Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 5.” They’re both used very widely in cinema, yet here they achieve a beautiful alchemy with the film’s visuals and tone.

SR: I didn't have the songs chosen at the script level, but even at that early stage I knew that music was going to be very important to create this family’s environment. And I knew that every song would be diegetic. All the music you hear in the first half of the film is diegetic: it's always playing from the computer, from the car radio… That was a very important part of my childhood.

But it’s interesting that you should mention those two songs. To be honest, those were both picked by my dear friend and editor Kurt Walker as temp music for the edit. And then we just got completely hooked on them. “An Ending” especially was meant to be temporary, because we both knew it was such a heavy-hitting song. But then for the way we ended up editing—with these cross fades and this sort of temporal space between heaven and earth—it was just so perfect that it was very hard to remove it. Same with Beethoven’s piece. I always warn other filmmakers not to edit with music because you’ll get attached and it’ll be very difficult to withdraw yourself from it. As for the Daniel Johnston song you hear at the end, that was originally supposed to be Laurie Anderson’s “Oh, Superman.” But we could not get the rights. I went through such an unbelievable emotional journey to find the right song for the end of the movie, and I’m honestly so much happier with Daniel Johnston’s—I think it’s perfect: his vulnerability, the lyrics…

RS: Early into Still Processing, you say that it’s taken you three years to finish the film, and that you’re not actually sure it’s finished. Would you say the same about Blue Heron? Or do you think you’ve arrived at a clearer sense of catharsis?

SR: That’s a great question. I think with Still Processing, the title says it all: this is just a work in progress. And I don’t think I would change anything about it now. But when it came out, I was just so anxious to reveal that level of vulnerability that I wondered if I could or should actually release it. But it's out in the world now, and I’m happy it is. Blue Heron, on the other hand, is a hundred percent done. I watched it last night at the premiere and I am happy to say that I wouldn't change anything. Everything is intentional; if anything feels out of place to you, I meant it.