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Sophy Romvari’s award-winning drama “Blue Heron” has sold to Spain (Flamingo Films), Benelux (Cherry Pickers), Turkey (Kinova Art Distribution) and France (Potemkine Films), sales agent MoreThan Films announced Monday.
The film world premiered at Locarno, where it won the Swatch First Feature Award. It was also shown and awarded at Toronto, San Sebastián, London, Gent and many more. In his review from the fest, Variety’s Guy Lodge praised it as a “graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature” that has a “sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.”
According to Nils Bouaziz, CEO at Potemkine Films, “Blue Heron” is “quietly powerful” and captures “the fragile beauty of the real with rare emotional precision.”
“Continuing our long history of distributing independent North American films, we are delighted and proud to be handling the French release of Sophy Romvari’s magnificent film.”
Queralt Pons, co-founder of MoreThan Films, added: “We’re proud to have partnered with distributors whose editorial identity and curatorial vision we deeply admire. We’re confident they will create the best release strategies for the film in their territories. Additionally, we are under negotiations for deals in the U.K. and Japan that we expect to close in the following weeks.”
MoreThan Films’ Lidia Damatto said: “We’re delighted with the connection the film has created with audiences and with the resulting interest from distributors in different territories.”
Inspired by her own childhood, Romvari tells the story of a Hungarian immigrant family of six which relocates to Vancouver Island. However, the behavior of little Sasha’s older brother, Jeremy, becomes increasingly erratic.
“I have been making personal work from the start of my career, and how people connect to it has always been a question I consider deeply. I don’t make films just for myself, so part of the construction is finding ways to ensure there are entry points for the audience,” she told Variety.
“There is never any guarantee, so it wasn’t until the film premiered that I understood how intensely it was speaking to a universal experience. It’s been quite exceptional.”
Romvari never wanted to make a documentary about her family.
“My previous work explores very similar personal themes but often through a documentary or hybrid documentary lens. My thesis film ‘Still Processing’ is somewhat of a prequel to this film and was intensely vulnerable as I appear in the film as myself,” she said.
“For my feature debut I wanted to focus entirely on directing. I wanted to control the formal elements with more precision than in my previous work. I realized I didn’t need the documentary mode to tap into vulnerability, and with fiction I was granted more creative freedom.”
She tried to depict the experience of coming-of-age “quite literally”: “The moment when time dissolves between adolescence and adulthood and you are left putting together the pieces. All my previous work depicts a filmmaker, often myself, in search of answers about her past, so this film was a natural expansion of my career to date.”
She noted: “The concept of time travel was something I wanted to explore explicitly through the fiction form, rather than through breaking the reality of the film as I had done in previous films where I appear as myself. Not being able to change the outcome of the past is critical to the main character’s journey of acceptance of her grief, and of my own.”
She won’t be staying away from personal stories in the future either.
“I believe all the work I’ll do is likely to have a personal element, but more so just through my perspective as a director and artist. To me, the most important questions are always: ‘Why does this need to be a film?’ What about the story, or concept, lends itself to the medium specifically, and what about me as an artist can bring something interesting or worthwhile to exploring any given topic?”
English (US) ·