We first encountered Sophy Romvari last year in Locarno, where Blue Heron (2025) left a lasting impression on us before embarking on an extraordinary festival journey around the world. Looking back at her earlier work, it becomes clear that the emotional universe of her acclaimed feature debut had already been taking shape for years.
Made between 2016 and 2020, the six films in this programme form an intimate map of family, grief, care and the images we keep close. Romvari often begins from her own life — relatives, pets, photographs, recorded voices, domestic spaces — but her work never feels sealed inside private experience. Instead, she uses the personal as a way of reaching something shared: the strange persistence of childhood memories, the weight of family stories, the pain of losing those who have been part of our everyday lives.
Across Nine Behind, It’s Him, Grandma’s House, Norman Norman, In Dog Years and Still Processing, Romvari moves between essay, documentary and diaristic filmmaking with remarkable ease. Her films are modest in scale but emotionally exact, attentive to what can be held in a room, a face, a gesture, a photograph, or the presence of an animal.
In an interview for Screen Slate, Romvari described her earlier films as "some sort of self-interrogation of the past." The phrase is an apt description of the six shorts gathered here. Working from family photographs, home movies, recorded voices and personal experience, Romvari returns to her own history not to reconstruct it faithfully but to question it: to examine the fractures of identity she inherited through her Hungarian family, the stories left untold, and the absences that continue to shape the present.
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