Director Sophie Ronvalli’s award-winning drama “The Blue Heron” has been sold to Spain (Flamingo Films), Benelux (Cherry Pickers), Turkey (Kinova Art Distribution) and France (Potemkine Films), sales agent Morethan Films announced Monday.
The film had its world premiere at Locarno and won the Swatch Award for Best Feature. The film was also screened and won awards in Toronto, San Sebastian, London, and Ghent. In his review for the fest, Guy Lodge of Variety praised the album as an “elegant and profoundly heart-wrenching debut” with “an acute understanding of how memories form and age, and how it is often the serendipitous ambient details that we recall as vividly as the more important events at hand.”
According to Nils Bouaziz, CEO of Potemkine Films, “Blue Heron” is “quietly powerful” and captures “authentic, fragile beauty with rare emotional precision.”
“Continuing our long history of distributing North American independent films, we are delighted and proud to be working on the French release of Sophie Ronvari’s wonderful film.”
Keralt Pons, co-founder of Morethan Films, added: “We are proud to partner with a distribution company whose editorial identity and curatorial vision we deeply respect. We are confident that they will develop the best release strategy for the film in their respective territories. Additionally, we are negotiating contracts in the UK and Japan, which are expected to close in the coming weeks.”
Lydia Damat of Morethan Films said: “We are pleased that the film has created a connection with audiences and has resulted in increased interest from various regional distributors.”
Inspired by his own childhood, Ronvari tells the story of a Hungarian immigrant family of six who moved to Vancouver Island. However, Sasha’s older brother Jeremy’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic.
“I’ve been making personal work since the beginning of my career, and how people connect to it is always a question I think deeply about. I’m not making films just for myself, so finding a way to secure an entry point for the audience is also part of the construction,” she told Variety.
“There are no guarantees, so I didn’t realize how powerfully this film spoke to a universal experience until it first premiered. This was very exceptional.”
Ronvari didn’t want to make a documentary about his family.
“My previous films explore very similar personal themes, but often through the lens of a documentary or hybrid documentary. My graduate film ‘Still Processing’ was like a prequel to this film, and it was very vulnerable because I appeared in the film as myself,” she said.
“For my feature debut, I wanted to concentrate completely on directing. I wanted to have more precise control over the formal elements than in my previous work. I realized that I didn’t need the documentary mode to explore vulnerability, and fiction gave me more creative freedom.”
She tried to portray the experience of growing up in a “quite literal” way. “The moment when time melts between adolescence and adulthood and you put the pieces together. All of my previous work has been about filmmakers, often myself, searching for answers about my past, so this film was a natural extension of my career to date.”
“The concept of time travel was something I wanted to explore explicitly through the form of fiction, rather than by breaking the reality of the film, as in previous films in which I played myself. The inability to change the outcome of the past is crucial to the protagonist’s journey to coming to terms with her grief and my own.”
She won’t shy away from personal stories in the future.
“I believe that any work I try to do is likely to have a personal element, but only through my perspective as a director and artist. The most important question for me is always: ‘Why does this have to be a movie?’ Is the story or concept particularly suited to that medium, and can I, as an artist, bring something interesting or valuable to exploring a particular topic?”
