Blue Heron

Last night I had a double feature at the Broadway starting with Blue Heron.  This is an incredibly moving exploration of the fallibility of memory and I absolutely loved it.  The narrative begins with flashbacks to when an eight-year-old girl named Sasha (Eylul Guven) moves to Vancouver Island in the 1990s with her family of Hungarian immigrants, including her mother (Iringo Reti), father (Adam Tompa), and older brothers Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), Henry (Liam Serg), and Felix (Preston Drabble).  Her parents are worried about her brother Jeremy's increasingly erratic behavior even though her interactions with him are positive, especially when he gives her a blue heron key chain.  Events are from Sasha's eight year old perspective with images that are hazy and fragmentary as the family settles into their new surroundings (the cinematography is beautiful).  Jeremy's actions are largely on the periphery with little understanding of what is motivating his behavior and dialogue is often muted, particularly when Sasha overhears tense phone calls to family members and conversations with psychologists and social workers.  The narrative then shifts to Sasha (Amy Zimmer) as an adult twenty years later.  She is working on a documentary about the events depicted and, as she views the photographs and videos taken during this period and listens to the interviews with psychologists and social workers with a different perspective, her memories are recontextualized.  She is finally able to reconcile her feelings about her brother and his mental health issues and to absolve her parents for his fate (in an incredibly poignant twist that I will not spoil here).  I really love the theme of art as a way to heal and not only is this theme beautifully and hauntingly portrayed in this film but, because it is semi-autobiographical, the film itself is director Sophy Romvari's attempt to process her own childhood memories.  The structure is very impressionistic but every seemingly random vignette is imbued with meaning that is eventually revealed and I found it spellbinding.  I cannot recommend this enough but be prepared for an emotional response.