Sophy Romvari tends to keep her expectations “tempered.” From the inception of her debut feature, Blue Heron, the Canadian native stayed focused on what she could control: the experience of making her deeply autobiographical film on her own terms. She didn’t have much hopes for a splashy acquisition out of a festival bow, much less a months-long press tour from there.

“I definitely had no expectation of theatrical distribution for an independent Canadian personal drama in the year of 2026. I assumed that it would go straight to streaming,” she says. “The feedback you get from the industry as a new filmmaker is just, ‘It’s a bad time. No one’s taking risks.’” 

And yet here Romvari sits on a Hollywood restaurant patio, struggling to find time for bites of her chopped salad between thoughtful answers to questions about her unlikely indie sensation. Blue Heron did not, it turns out, go straight to streaming; on the contrary, it’s being carefully rolled out on big screens across North America by the selective Janus Films. Romvari’s drama is the best-reviewed feature of the year, per both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and has already won awards at festivals ranging from Locarno (where it world premiered) to Toronto (where Janus snatched up the rights). 

Even now, though, on the verge of Blue Heron’s Los Angeles release, Romvari prefers to keep things in perspective. “My life up until now has been a mix of part-time jobs, editing and grants — and that’s how I’ve made an income,” she says. “The entire goal is: Can I build a career in which it’s sustainable to continue to make work?”

The 35-year-old Romvari made her name on the short-film circuit, with often raw self-portraits digging into her family’s archives and traumas. She grew up on Vancouver Island with her parents and three brothers, who’d emigrated from Hungary just before she was born; coming to terms with the deaths of two of her older brothers makes up the acclaimed Still Processing, while Norman, Norman centers on her beloved older dog as she grapples with his mortality. The memoiristic project reaches a kind of culmination in Blue Heron, which is not a documentary — but is still firmly rooted in Romvari’s own past, and specifically the reverberations of her troubled eldest brother’s sudden death. 

“I feel like a different person after having made this movie because now I feel like I can move through the world knowing that I’ve done everything I can to unpack and understand that period of my life and of my family’s life,” Romvari says. “I’ve explored it artistically in a way that allows me to move forward in a way that I don’t think I could have, had I not done this.”

The Vancouver-set Blue Heron artfully plays in two timelines, first as an intimate family drama seen through the eyes of young Sasha (Eylul Guven), Romvari’s stand-in, as she observes the growing tension between her mother (Iringó Réti) and her brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), who seems increasingly withdrawn and isolated. Around halfway, we jump forward to the aftermath of Jeremy’s death, with an adult Sasha (now played by Amy Zimmer) working as a filmmaker and trying to piece together what happened and why. These two sections meet, in a sense, in Blue Heron’s moving and surprising climax, which recreates a core scene from Romvari’s childhood — or at least seems to, on the surface. 

“Watching this movie, someone would expect that this is the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened in my life — but this one occurrence, this conversation, I do not remember that happening,” she says. “People might see this film beat by beat as my life, and I have to accept that as someone who’s made myself vulnerable as a filmmaker.”

In reality, Blue Heron is a more complex enterprise — emotionally delicate and rigorous, certainly, but also unusually controlled for a debut. This was by design, as Romvari exercised patience to make this moment count, refining her visual style and tightening her narrative approach. She was also working with a ton of cinematic references, if not overtly, that flow through her singular expression.

When asked to name touchstones, she sips her Diet Coke, laughs and pulls out her phone, her salad still mostly untouched. “I’m so grateful to Letterboxd. Letterboxd is my brain,” she says. She names the detailed master shots of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and the agonizing intimacy of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation as a few crucial inspirations. Later, she pulls up an email she’d sent to her star, Zimmer, with the subject line “Subtle Women’s Cinema.” It’s stacked with other influences, like Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter.  

Yet time may have had the biggest impact on Blue Heron. “First features are often very dense with ideas, and that can go many ways, but I feel like because I waited a little bit longer — a lot of people make their first feature earlier — I benefited from the confidence and the creative capacity to have more distance between myself and the narrative than if I’d made it in my 20s,” she says. “When you’re a filmmaker working with limited means, you never know if you’re going to get another chance. I really wanted to be sure that I was doing absolutely the most I could. I really did make exactly the movie I wanted to make.” 

Through the Canadian arts-funding system, Romvari received a research grant to write the Blue Heron script, which she lived on during that period, and then a production grant to actually make the movie. “When I started making work in Canada, I was not aware of the privilege of living in a country that has access to arts funding,” she says. “The version of this film that I would’ve made within the American system would be very, very different — and I don’t know if that one would’ve gotten distribution.” 

Even with the government backing, though, Romvari needed a certain steadfastness. She started casting before she had the money for production. “It was like, ‘We’ve got to go, I’m making this movie,’” she says. “That’s really half of the battle: Just saying, ‘I am a filmmaker and I’m making a movie.’”

Following a summer shoot, Romvari camped out in Blue Heron editor Kurt Walker’s living room all through the Toronto winter, and she got a job as a supervisor at her local movie theater to make ends meet while wrapping post-production: “I obviously ran out of money, so I just was like, ‘Can I work here?’” She still works there part-time and had the chance to show Blue Heron there as a special preview screening. Romvari walked across the street to introduce the movie, went back home to eat leftovers and walk her dog while the film played, then returned for a Q&A. 

Romvari is in it for that hustle. “A lot of filmmakers seem to hate filmmaking — or they seem to hate being on set, or maybe they hate post or whatever — and this is not something I could imagine doing unless I loved it as much as I do,” she says. “Every day I was like, ‘Wow, you are exerting so much emotional and intellectual and social energy every single day.’ You have to be, every day, willing to solve problems, answer questions, and be on your most present game. I surprised myself that I was able to sustain that throughout the entire shoot and stay present and enjoy that process.”

She at one point calls the Blue Heron shoot a “blast,” which might seem counter to the heaviness of the material, or the intensity of what the writer-director had to conjure from the past to get it right. She’d relay painful recollections to her parents — who have since seen and loved the film — only for them to present very different versions of events. She had to reimagine her late brother through the eyes of her childhood self. All that work fed into a question of artistic motivation that undergirds Blue Heron, in all its juicy meta layers: “Why did I become a filmmaker?”

Of course, filmmaking is what Romvari loves — and so there is joy in that question, however laced with the poignancy of grief. Romvari is just getting started in her career, while still determined to keep her expectations manageable — her gaze fixated squarely on creating and improving. “It was like I was trying to learn a language with my short films, and then I was finally fluent in that language by the time I got to this feature,” she says. 

As we wrap, she looks down at her plate and smiles: “I ate three bites of my salad.” It’s no shock — this is a filmmaker with a lot to say.