The Culturist Film Club: Blue Heron on September 28
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.
Cinema Space is a fully voluntary and independent initiative based in Abu Dhabi that started in 2014. If you live in Abu Dhabi and have not attended any of their screenings, I strongly suggest you join their mailing list.
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