A small great filigree

Luckily, as the review format in this newspaper is set up, those of us who write them do not have to detail in the listing which genre the film we are reviewing belongs to. If that were not the case, with films like Blue heron we would have a hard time. What a cunningly strange and indefinable film. What exactly is this debut by the Canadian Sophy Romvari? It begins looking like intimate and impressionistic indie cinema, continues by introducing quasi-documentary and essayistic elements, and the narrative ends up folding in on itself in a narrative device almost like fantasy cinema that unites past and present within the same images.

Blue heron is a story about family memory, open wounds, and regret. Romvari explores the formal margins of autofiction, rewriting in images some pages from the personal diary of her life. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants who moved to Vancouver in the 90s, the filmmaker asks herself questions about her older brother's personality disorder, an event that marked her and which she considers unresolved. More complex, profound, daring, and sophisticated than its whispered images seem to indicate, Blue heron ends up also being a very moving film because it stages a fantasy in which everyone can project themselves: What if I could return to the past to meet my family and elucidate facts that at the time I was not able to understand?