'Blue Heron' is Sophy Romvari's debut feature.TIFF/via The Canadian Press
A coming-of-age drama about a Canadian-Hungarian family’s turbulent time settling into their new home on Vancouver Island has been named best Canadian feature by the Toronto Film Critics Association.
Blue Heron writer-director Sophy Romvari accepted the $50,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award for her debut feature at a gala Monday night.
Centred on a Hungarian family adjusting to life in Canada, her semi-autobiographical film gradually uncovers family tensions through the viewpoint of the youngest child.
In December, Blue Heron won best first feature in the main slate of the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards – an honour that makes Romvari just the third filmmaker, after Sarah Polley and Zacharias Kunuk, to claim both prizes in the same year.
Another major winner announced at the ceremony was Endless Cookie, which won the $50,000 Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award.
The surrealist animated doc, directed by Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver, traces the filmmakers’ own story as half-brothers – one Indigenous, one white – reflecting on their different upbringings through a collection of personal anecdotes.
Runners-up in both categories each received a $5,000 prize from Rogers.
In the dramatic category, the other nominees were Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds.
In the documentary category, Virginia Tangvald’s Ghosts of the Sea and Jean-François Poisson’s Who Killed the Montreal Expos? were named runners-up.