Blue Heron (2025)

Programmer's Note: Sublime and affecting, and cut from a similar cloth to "Aftersun", this striking debut feature sees Sophy Romvari take on childhood, memory, and grief with rare tenderness. We are immersed in a family of six, newly settled on Vancouver Island, as we largely inhabit the youngest child’s p.o.v. as her parents struggle to understand their troubled eldest son. What’s most impressive is the film’s form and audiovisual language: Romvari plays with structural, spatial, and temporal elements in an almost unobtrusive (and thus extraordinarily intimate) way, revealing the potential of filmmaking to express the intangible—what I would describe as the 'fadings' of memory, and the 'shadings' of what remains. (Eternality Tan, Vice-Chair & Programming Director)