In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha moves with her Canadian-Hungarian family to idyllic Vancouver Island. Clear skies, endless nature and carefree days on the beach form the backdrop to her childhood. She plays with her brothers, makes new friends and explores the freedom of her new home. But beneath that idyllic surface, a tension is simmering that seems ready to erupt at any moment. Her older brother Jeremy is struggling with himself, and his increasingly unpredictable behaviour is putting the family under strain. Sasha doesn’t understand what is troubling him, but continues to seek his company.

For her feature film debut, the Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari draws on her own childhood and family history. We follow Sasha not only as a child, but also as an adult who tries to reconstruct her childhood through photographs and home videos. With this kaleidoscopic narrative structure, Romvari allows the past and present, memory and imagination to blend into one another. Blue Heron thus becomes an intimate and multi-layered exploration of family, loss and our attempts, years later, to understand what we could not grasp as children. The film won an award at the Locarno Film Festival and was subsequently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and Film Fest Gent, amongst others.