Tina Kakadelis
While part of the allure of the Toronto International Film Festival is the buzzy A-List stars who flock to the friendliest festival on earth, the real thrill is the feeling of discovering someone just before they skyrocket to stardom. That may be the case with Sophy Romvari and the North American premiere of Blue Heron. This is her feature film debut, which picked up the Best Canadian Discovery Award at the TIFF award ceremony, and follows a series of acclaimed short films that have previously played at the festival. Blue Heron uses the thematic threads of her shorts to create a film as warm as it is cold. It’s the story of a family filled with love that struggles to handle all the changes life throws at it.
For the opening, the camera sits in the back of a moving van. The only light comes through a small crack between the truck bed and the pull-down door as we amble along to a destination unknown. Finally, the door is pulled open, and a Hungarian-Canadian family moving to Vancouver Island is drenched in light. There are six of them: mother (Iringó Réti), father (Ádám Tompa), oldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), twin middle children (Liam Serg & Preston Drabble), and Sasha (Eylul Guven), the youngest. They’re moving to help Jeremy, who has been growing angrier and angrier as he gets older, unable to vocalize what bothers him so deeply. Blue Heron chronicles a summer of Sasha’s youth, then jumps forward in time to Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker, making a documentary about her childhood.
Our entry point to this family is Sasha. In the beginning, she’s probably around six years old. There’s only so much she understands about the things that are happening around her. She frolics on the beach with her mother and her brothers, but doesn’t understand why Jeremy sits isolated, unmoving and unspeaking. There’s so much pain in him that he cannot vocalize. His siblings don’t understand and his parents have grown frustrated. They aren’t frustrated by Jeremy, but by all the professionals they’ve reached out to who haven’t had any answers for them. It’s clear that his parents love him and are trying to get an answer that will allow Jeremy to feel better, but it’s the late 1990s. While mental healthcare isn’t particularly robust now, it was worse then.
“Thank you for your memories, they’re all I have now,” is one of the earliest lines of dialogue in Blue Heron. When we hear this voice for the first time, we don’t know who’s speaking or who they’re referring to. We are set up for something heartbreaking, though, because whoever it’s about is no longer here. Blue Heron isn’t purposefully trying to keep secrets, and it becomes obvious fairly quickly who will leave this world earlier than they would have anticipated. This is about the reality of mental health—the gut-wrenching truth that a solid support system isn’t always enough. A person must be able to accept the help they’re being offered. No one can force them. In the late 1990s, medication wasn’t as widely available or as accepted as it is now, even with the current stigmas. Blue Heron is profoundly earnest about the struggles people go through, not passing judgments nor condemning, but asking how things can be changed in the future.
Blue Heron is the sort of deeply personal debut feature that will knock the breath right out of your lungs. It’s a film that understands the importance of cataloguing memories in any way you can: Jeremy makes hand-drawn maps that are immensely detailed, the father teaches all his children how to develop film, and Sasha becomes a documentarian. There’s a scene when the kids are alone with their father in the kitchen. The younger ones are standing by the sink, while Jeremy sits atop the counter. Wordlessly, he reaches into the cabinet and pulls out powdered sugar and a sifter. He imitates snowfall right there in the kitchen, to the delight of his younger siblings, as his father takes photos. Jeremy shares a look with his father before he begins his snowfall antics. The look isn’t about permission, but to see if his dad is ready to capture this moment. For all the pain he was in, there were moments when he could break through and give the people he loved something to remember about him that wasn’t anger.
Blue Heron comes from a keychain that Sasha is given early in the film, which she keeps with her into adulthood. It’s not kept out of practicality, but as a daily reminder of a part of her life that doesn’t exist anymore. Blue Heron is a quietly constructed rumination on love, loss, and the lifeboat of memories.
