Blue Heron — A Film About Arriving Somewhere New
Blue Heron — A Film About Arriving Somewhere New
The Creemore Film Club closes its spring season on June 19 with something worth watching slowly.
There is a great blue heron that stands at the bend in the Mad River near Singhampton. You can almost always find it in the same spot, in the same posture — still, attentive, seemingly indifferent to the sound of passing cars or the occasional dog making noise on the far bank. I’ve been watching it for years. It has an authority that most things lack.
I’ve been thinking about that heron since I read about the film the Creemore Film Club is screening on June 19th, 2026.
Blue Heron is the debut feature from Canadian director Sophy Romvari, and it is — quietly, without announcement — one of the most accomplished first films to come out of this country in some time. It won awards at TIFF in 2025. It played at Locarno. It was released theatrically in the United States by Janus Films — the company that distributes Criterion films, which tells you something about the company it keeps.
The film is semi-autobiographical, drawn from Romvari’s own childhood and from her earlier short Still Processing. It tells the story of Sasha, eight years old, the daughter of a Hungarian immigrant family that has just relocated to Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. The landscape is new. The school is new. Her oldest brother is struggling in ways that are difficult for a child to name. The film watches all of this with the quiet, unhurried attention of a child who is learning to look.
It is a film about arriving somewhere new and trying to understand what you’ve arrived in — which is, in different ways, a thing most people in this part of Ontario know something about.
There’s a particular quality to films that trust their subject enough to slow down. Blue Heron has that quality. It doesn’t hurry toward resolution. It stays with Sasha in her confusion and her noticing — the way she watches her brother, the way she watches the landscape, the way she is still making sense of things that the adults around her have already filed away.
Romvari made this film with funding from Telefilm Canada and the National Film Institute of Hungary — a collaboration that seems fitting for a story about a family holding two countries at once. The cast is largely non-professional or first-time actors, which gives it the texture of something remembered rather than performed.
The Village Green is a good room for a film like this. Small enough that you feel the quiet with everyone else. The right size for something that doesn’t need a big screen to hit hard.
Doors open at 6:30. The film screens at 7:30. There will be a feature cocktail, wine, beer, popcorn, and other treats available before and during — the Film Club does this well and it’s always worth arriving early to settle in.
Individual tickets are $12. A season membership — which would have covered all eight films and included preferred seating — is $80, still available if you’d like to be part of the fall season when it begins.
This is the last film of the spring run, and I’m glad it’s this one. A quiet, beautiful film. A room full of people who came to watch it together. A June evening in Creemore.
That’s the thing about community film nights: the experience of watching something in a room with your neighbours — laughing at the same moments, going quiet at the same moments — is its own argument for why they matter. The Creemore Film Club has been making that argument for a full season now. It’s been a pleasure to be part of it.
Come see the last one. We hope you enjoy the show, and the company surrounding you.
Blue Heron
Presented by the Creemore Film Club / TIFF Film Circuit
Creemore Village Green — Station on the Green
Friday, June 19, 2026
Doors: 6:30 pm | Film: 7:30 pm
Tickets: $12 individual | $80 season membership
Sponsor: Suzanne Lawrence, Broker — where town and country meet®
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