Doha Film Festival 2025

Blue Heron

International Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Sophy Romvari / Canada, Hungary / 2025 / 91 min / Unknown / DCP / In English, Hungarian / Arabic, English subtitles
Themes: Drama
Rated: Parental guidance is advised for viewers under the age of 15. Individuals under the age of 15 are not admitted into cinemas unless accompanied by an individual aged 18 or over.

Description

Set in the late 1990s, ‘Blue Heron’ follows eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family as they begin again on Vancouver Island, searching for stability and a sense of home in unfamiliar surroundings. The small rituals of settling in gradually knit a fragile peace that is soon unsettled by the erratic behaviour of Sasha’s older brother, Jeremy. Years later, an adult Sasha looks back on those formative days and asks what tenderness survives upheaval. She returns to fragments of home videos, taped conversations, faded photographs, attempting to assemble a truthful picture from partial memories, hovering in the tender space between guilt and love, grief and care, what was lost and what remains.

Drawing from her own experience, writer-director Sophy Romvari crafts an intimately observed debut that delicately merges fiction and memory. The film embraces the natural textures of family life: awkward silences, sudden warmth, misunderstandings that bruise, and the small mercies that follow. Visually poetic and emotionally resonant, ‘Blue Heron’ dissolves the boundary between realism and recollection, letting image and feeling drift together like tides. Both haunting and humane, it is a quiet study of how we carry our families within us, even as time reshapes what we remember and how we heal.

Director

Sophy Romvari

Sophy Romvari is a Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker based in Toronto. Her critically-acclaimed short films have travelled the international festival circuit and earned her a reputation as a leading young talent. She has screened at TIFF, Hot Docs, Sheffield, and True/False, and has received a retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image. She has also directed films for CBC Short Docs and Kino Lorber. In 2020, Sophy completed her Master’s at York University. Her thesis film 'Still Processing' premiered at TIFF in September 2020, was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award, and was featured in a collection of Sophy’s eight short films on the Criterion Channel.

Credits

Screenwriter

Sophy Romvari

Producer

Ryan Bobkin, Gábor Osváth, Sara Wylie

Cinematographer

Maya Bankovic

Editor

Kurt Walker

Music

Jody Colero, Amanda Clemens

Cast

Eylul Guven Iringó Réti Adam Tompa Edik Beddoes Amy Zimmer

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