Every year, a new indie debut is anointed by the film industry before public release. Last year it was Ava Victor’s Sorry Baby (2025). This year, it’s Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, an impeccable, almost singular film that explores memory in a way only cinema can. It is tender, it is striking, and it is exceptionally personal.
“Almost singular” does not refer to the films’ metatextual reaction to the cinema of 2022 (The Fablemans, Aftersun, Everything Everywhere All At Once), but to Romvari’s excellent preceding short-films, 9 of which are currently streaming on The Criterion Channel. Rarely is the annual anointing the culmination of so complete a project and voice. Romvari’s documentary short film Still Processing (2020) tells the same story as Blue Heron is ⅓ the time to the same amount of tears jerked. But only Blue Heron makes magic out of memory. Expanding across the US for the last few weeks, it arrives in Winston-Salem at A/perture Cinema this Friday, May 15th, 2026.
Edik Beddoes as Jeremy in Sophy Romvari’s 2025 Drama Blue Heron. Image courtesy of Janus Films.
“ I wish I had a better answer”
Sometimes, a person is beyond our current capacity to help. Blue Heron is the story of an oldest son whose father, mother, siblings, and community are at a total loss. He is manic, he is dangerous, he is funny, he is kind. He is Jeremy, played by newcomer Edik Beddoes. He and his family have recently moved to Vancouver Island, and he’s unhappy. His younger sister Sasha, played beautifully by other newcomer Eylul Guven, is Romvari’s stand-in, watching her mother try desperately to keep the children entertained while their father works on his big, brown, boxy computer. Iringó Reti (Land of Warm Waters, Most of the Souls That Live Here) is a complex mother, balancing the love for one child with the instinct to protect her others. Ádám Tompa (On Falling, The Counterpart) plays the father, at first appearing negligent, it is a testament to his performance that the depth of his paternal involvement can be backfilled into the film when there’s space for it in the pacing.
Romvari’s film insists on the “semi” in “semi-autobiographical,” landing between a sketch and a portrait of a family in trouble, the result is a stately collage. This metaphor feels apt, as the filmmaker has literalized collage in film throughout her career. Her first short, Nine Behind (2016) seems to be a recreation of a phone call she had with her estranged, Production Designer grandfather in Budapest. It’s Him (2017) is a narrative short about a missing older brother. Pumpkin Movie (2017) sees two friends recounting their year of scary encounters with men. Grandma’s House (2018) takes auto-fiction to the next level as she holds up photos from her Grandmother’s scrapbooks to her house, entering the family history she missed. Norman Norman (2018) is an existential reaction to Barbra Streisand’s announcement that she cloned her dog, starring Romvari’s dog Norman. In Dog Years (2019) is a documentary film that stars a series of dogs as their humans talk about what they’ll do when their pets pass away. Remembrance of József Romvári (2020) sees a return to photography as she documents her now deceased grandfather’s film career. And then, Still Processing stars Romvari as she opens a box of family photos. Throughout her short-film career, Romvari has explored grief from within it, and from a point of morbid anticipation.
Iringó Reti and Eylul Guven in Sophy Romvari’s 2025 Drama Blue Heron. Image courtesy of Janus Films.
Blue Heron, like all of Sophy Romvari’s short-films, interrogates our relationship to memory, specifically her memories of those she loves. There are few filmmakers so young and so familiar with death and despair. There are fewer still who can fill your heart up with the love she remembers and in exchange, ask you to fill the film with your own. The techniques employed are mature and touching executions of the precedented. Distinct to the film is the wistful regret that seasons these techniques, and the personal intercession that only creating art can provide. This is the anointment of a new voice, but it is also a stunning achievement by an already prolific filmmaker, finishing a project she started 9 short films ago. It is more than worth the watch, it is worth a re-watch.
Final score: 5/5
Expanding across the US for the last few weeks, Blue Heron (2025) arrives in Winston-Salem at A/perture Cinema this Friday, May 15th, 2026.