The Culturist Film Club: Blue Heron
On Monday, September 28, The Culturist Film Club will be in Abu Dhabi for the first time. I will introduce and screen Blue Heron directed Sophy Romvari, part of Cinema Space’s September line up at Manarat Al Saadiyat and free to attend.
I’ve previously screened another film by Sophy Romvari titled Still Processing (2020), and Blue Heron is an expansion of that short film. I look forward to sharing and discussing the film with an audience in Abu Dhabi.
Date and time: Monday, September 28 at 7.30pm
Location: Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi
Free entry, reserve a spot here.
BLUE HERON
Sophy Romvari, 2025, 91 min
English, Hungarian with English subtitles
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island, but their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behavior from the eldest son, Jeremy. At wit’s end, their parents are presented with a shattering choice.
Award-winning director Sophy Romvari’s feature debut is a lyrical and profound testament to the things we carry with us, masterfully chronicling the haze of a languid summer and the hyaline clarity of the moments that defined it.
Winner: Locarno Film Festival 2025 Swatch First Feature Award
Winner: Toronto International Film Festival 2025 Best Canadian Discovery
"On one level, Blue Heron is a period piece, vividly limning the textures (and technology) of its era (including a few well-placed Canadian heritage moments) to locate Sasha’s coming-of-age in a concrete context; at the same time, it’s an ambitious and elliptical exercise in structure, slicing deftly through time, space and point-of-view until the distance between past and present – and also reality and fantasy – collapses altogether." — Adam Nayman, BFI