The imperfection of memory\u00a0and the exploration and processing of what is not entirely knowable are themes that run through Romvari\u2019s shorts, now streaming on\u00a0the Criterion Channel<\/a>, which the filmmaker jokingly described as\u00a0\u201clonely girls on laptops.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the repeated theme, just a woman on a computer looking at images from the past,\u201d said Romvari of her shorts. \u201cThere is a fascination with trying to access something that is inaccessible.\u201d<\/p>\n Her master\u2019s thesis film<\/a>, \u201cStill Processing,\u201d features Romvari digitizing and looking at her father\u2019s old photographs and videos, and discovering footage of her deceased brother in the process. The second half is a fictional recreation of the making of the film itself \u2014 the meta aspect of Romvari\u2019s work is underlined by the director also being the film\u2019s subject.<\/p>\n Her shorts are hybrid documentaries, and were Romvari\u2019s attempt at \u201cfiguring out what modes I want to work in.\u201d Her new film, \u201cBlue Heron<\/a>,\u201d is different, not only because it is Romvari\u2019s first scripted narrative feature, but because each decision, both in terms of its structure and the filmmaking behind it, was wholly intentional. <\/p>\n If those shorts were early sketches, \u201cBlue Heron<\/a>\u201d is the masterful painting resulting from the more informal explorations. Romvari\u2019s aim with her first feature was as simple as it was complex: \u201cI really wanted to show someone trying to unravel their own life.\u201d<\/p>\n While the protagonist\u2019s name is Sasha, not Sophy, \u201cBlue Heron\u201d is autobiographical. The film is split into two distinct halves, separated by 20 years and united by Romvari\u2019s own journey to better understand her late brother and reconcile her memories of him.<\/p>\n In the first half of the film, Sasha (Eylul Guven) is eight years old. It\u2019s the summer of 1998, and her Hungarian immigrant family has just moved to Vancouver Island. The family\u2019s fresh start is interrupted by the increasingly dangerous behavior of Sasha\u2019s older brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). What is behind this behavior is a mystery to their parents, and they run through medical professionals, unable to diagnose or treat him. Romvari\u2019s camera and direction make Jeremy equally unknowable to the audience and Sasha.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mystery of [Jeremy in the film] is important because I think it\u2019s significant to anyone who has had a person like this in their family to address the fact that you can\u2019t always know them,\u201d said Romvari. \u201cYou can\u2019t actually access who they are because sometimes people don\u2019t want to be seen or understood. They don\u2019t allow you in, and that\u2019s part of what my experience was, just the frustration of never really having access and never really understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n Romvari doesn\u2019t remember if the things she knows about her brother were things she was told, or she overheard, or her actual memories of things she saw. The act of creating a scripted version gave her permission to take certain liberties in recreating it, but as Sasha is caught in the blast radius of Jeremy\u2019s increasingly frightening behavior, Romvari doesn\u2019t necessarily place us in the young protagonist\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be dogmatic about point of view, because I think oftentimes films that are about children are through the eyes of the child, only what we see from the child,\u201d said Romvari. \u201cBut if you\u2019re dealing with memory, I think oftentimes you can remember things that you never saw. It\u2019s like an implied memory.\u201d<\/p>\n Inspired by her own father\u2019s home movies and director Robert Altman<\/a>, Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic settled into longer takes, the camera on a tripod, and employing zooms to create a sense of movement. \u201cZooms [have] this very haunting point of view, a drifting feeling, and it really suited the form of the film,\u201d said Romvari.<\/p>\n Combined with the long lens zooms, sound is used to evoke a sense of memory and what it felt like to be in that house as a young girl. \u201cSound is also tied to other senses. It almost feels like you can smell sound, it\u2019s strange to say, but when you can hear people cutting grass or someone cooking in the kitchen, it starts to employ all of your senses at once, and can bring you back in time,\u201d said Romvari. \u201cWe\u2019re shooting these long zoom shots, there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s hidden from you that\u2019s outside the frame, so we were doing a lot to imply things that are off-screen [with sound], especially with Jeremy.\u201d<\/p>\n Romvari keeps the sound of her neighbors present as well. While the family feels isolated, they aren\u2019t, and sound lends itself to the ominous sense people are watching and they are being judged.<\/p>\n The first half of the film comes to an end when Sasha\u2019s parents are forced to face an impossible decision \u2014 if there is one thing that is concrete of Romvari\u2019s exploration of her memories, it\u2019s the empathic portrait she paints of her dedicated parents\u2019 journey. The transition to the film\u2019s second half, a 20-year time jump, is done simply with a phone call \u2014 \u201990s landline to iPhone \u2014 between Sasha and her parents.<\/p>\n \u201cI really wanted it to feel also like one of those conversations that you\u2019ve had with your parents a thousand times,\u201d said Romvari. \u201cShe asks, \u2018What do you think is wrong with Jeremy? Why do you think he\u2019s like this?\u2019 And then, 20 years goes by, and they\u2019re still having that same conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n With Jeremy now gone, it\u2019s a question adult Sasha has taken up with her work as a documentary filmmaker: hosting roundtables with medical professionals, interviewing one of her family\u2019s social workers on Zoom (the lonely girl on a laptop returns), and finding people who knew Jeremy on social media. While Sasha\u2019s documentary techniques are ones Romvari employed herself, it\u2019s a recreated and more carefully crafted version, while leaning into the magic of movies (to say more would be a spoiler) to fold the film\u2019s first half into the second.<\/p>\n Explained Romvari, \u201cI really wanted the audience to feel like once you\u2019re in Sasha\u2019s world as an adult, you\u2019re questioning the first half: Was that her memories, or was that the film that she\u2019s making? Is that something we\u2019re seeing now in retrospect? I really do fall into a trap, I love meta filmmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n If it is a trap, it\u2019s of a gifted and perceptive filmmaker using the medium to unravel their own life, a journey that lands in a familiar place for Romvari.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to show that this character is given that access, and it still doesn\u2019t change the outcome of the situation,\u201d said Romvari. \u201cAnd ultimately, the thesis of the film is having to accept that reality.\u201d<\/p>\n Janus Films will release \u201cBlue Heron\u201d in New York City on Friday, April 17 and Friday, April 24 in LA, with a nationwide expansion in May.<\/p>\n To hear Romvari\u2019s full interview, publishing later this week, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a> on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The brief history of cinema is filled with filmmakers obsessed with memory, both in their storytelling and as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":605267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,294568,134,1689,37998,5296,344,294569],"class_list":["post-605266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blue-heron","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","tag-interviews","tag-movies","tag-sophy-romvari"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Paddington](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Paddington-In-Peru-Header-StudioCanal.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"ESCAPE](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/MSDESFR_EC008.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4.Blue-Heron_Still-min.jpg\")
\u2018Blue Heron\u2019<\/p>\n![\"Maya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Blue-Heron-Maya-Bankovic-Sophy-Romvari-Chris-Merrell-Maria-Katarina-Robb-McCaghren.jpg\")
Maya Bankovic and Sophy Romvari<\/a> shooting \u2018Blue Heron\u2019Robb McCaghren<\/p>\n