By Dan Skip Allen

I’m a brother of three siblings,two brothers, and a sister. My family moved around a lot, and our situation regarding an alcoholic/abusive father caused us some trauma in our lives. Add in a disability due to head trauma when I was a child. It seemed to me like life wasn’t that good or fair from my point of view. This may have caused me to be a bit difficult at school or at jobs later in life. I had anger issues and became a lot like my father. Watching “Blue Heron” reminded me of myself and my younger brother to an extent. Kids can be difficult because of their genes or their background. It’s just a chemical in balance to a degree. This film hit home in some of those ways, and I can see why a lot of people are very high on it coming out of Tiff 50 last year.

Sasha (Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer) is an 8 year old girl who lives with her three brothers, Felix (Preston Drabble), Henry (Liam Serg) and Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) a teenager, and her mother (Iringo Reti) and father (Adam Tompa). They are a Hungarian family. They have just moved to Vancouver, Canada, in the early 90s. She goes around playing with some other girls she met and enjoys playing in a sprinkler or going to a local park from birdwatching or swimming. She notices her older brother and parents don’t get along, though. He’s a bit of a problem for them. He runs off and gets caught stealing by the police. They don’t know what to do with him. So, they turn to social services to help. As an adult, she tries to study her brother’s situation and decides to make a documentary about his circumstances.

As someone with a learning disability due to my head trauma as a child, I had to wear a hockey helmet until I was eleven years old. I didn’t have a lot of friends except my brother. As an adult, I’ve always gravitated towards older men because I was looking for a father figure in my life. My situation was a bit different than the Beddoes character, but there are similarities to this character in my personality. As someone who has worked at a school for twenty years and coaching sports, basketball & football, I have seen a lot of troubled kids because they had rough backgrounds. This story is a prime example of that to me. The film from Sophy Romvari depicts this perfectly to me.

Part of my disability is memory loss. This causes me to not remember things I’ve done before. I literally need to do things over and over again before I remember to do them. Whereas others can do things once or twice and remember how to do them. This can cause problems at school or at jobs. And for me, it has. That’s why I’ve had so many jobs in my lifetime. I can see how this is frustrating for people to deal with. The Beddoes character, on the other hand, had blindness issues that made him angry. This caused him to have anger issues. He acted out as a way to forget about his blindness. His sister tries to deal with the memory of her brother in her own way.

Besides the story and acting, the movie has one particular technical thing that stood out to me. That was the cinematography by Maya Bankovic (Ordinary Angels). She was able to capture the locations of Vancouver, Canada. This is a beautiful area of North America, but she gave it a period feel while also making it look breathtaking. The real craftsmanship, though, is with all of the closeups and side angles in the house or outside the house. She gave this intimate story an intimate look. The closeness of the family is juxtaposed to the distance of the Beddoes character in the camera work. The period look was also very distinct. This period is now in the past and had to look the way it was supposed to look like, and it did. She’s a cinematographer to watch for in the future.

One story element from the beginning of the film to the end was how the filmmaker made the story come from the point of view of this girl and woman played by two actresses. One is a little girl who is innocent and a lot to look forward to in life. She doesn’t necessarily understand why her brother is acting the way he does. She has a lot to learn. As an adult, she tries to understand her brother from a mental point of view and is making a documentary. This perspective to tell this particular story worked very well. You get to see two distinct ways to look at the brother and his problems. The child perspective and the adult perspective were distinctly different, and both worked. This was a fantastic script idea from the writer/ director Romvari.

“Blue Heron” is a movie that I could relate to on many levels. My own is one thing, but it’s the kids I’ve dealt with in my life that made this story come full circle for me. The acting in the film is fine, but it’s the script and direction by Romvari and cinematography by Bankovic that stood out to me the most. I can also understand how others would like this movie quite a bit as well. It’s an intimate story about something many who watch it. It will relate to it as well. That’s why it resonated with me but also so many others. This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in the first half of 2026, but I’m sure I’ll see many more in the second half of the year. Not many will have this kind of emotional impact for me. This was a fantastic little indie film that people need to see. I was glad I finally did.

🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 ½ stars