One of 2026’s Best Films, ‘Blue Heron’ Sets Criterion Channel Streaming Date

Exclusive: Expect to see Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari's intimate and introspective stunner on many critics' 10 best lists at the year's end.

Already one of 2026’s most revered films, Sophy Romvari‘s intimate memoir of a movie, “Blue Heron,” uses filmmaking as a mode of processing grief: In the late-1990s-set film, eight-year-old girl Sasha and her Hungarian-Canadian family are upheaved by her older brother’s behavioral issues. Flash forward, and an older Sasha (Amy Zimmer) is now a documentary filmmaker, looking back on this one chapter in her family’s life to unpack why traumatic events unfolded as they did.

IndieWire can exclusively reveal that first-time feature director Romvari’s film will premiere on the Criterion Channel starting July 21 at 8 p.m. ET. A home-video release from Criterion Premieres will follow in November. Romvari’s previous short films are currently playing on the Criterion Channel.

The film stars young newcomer Eylul Guven as Sasha in childhood, whose family relocates to a new home on Vancouver Island at the start of the film. Her withdrawn brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is meanwhile pushing her parents to the brink with increasingly dangerous and self-destructive impulses (Iringó Réti as Sasha’s mother and Ádám Tompa as her father, though it’s understood that Sasha and Jeremy share a different father). Eventually, the past and present collide in an unexpectedly metatextual, time-stopping flourish that elevates “Blue Heron” to the level of an introspective, personalized rumination on memory and grief akin to “Aftersun” — climactic emotional wallop and all.

Janus Films released “Blue Heron” in theaters earlier this year to an impressive box office total of more than $580,000 in the United States.

Below, IndieWire also shares a clip from Criterion’s forthcoming “Meet the Filmmaker” interview with Romvari about her experience as the only first-generation Canadian in her immediate family, and how that impacted her work.

More from IndieWire’s review of “Blue Heron” from the 2025 Locarno Film Festival: “Romvari’s preoccupation with fractured identities ambitiously expands to reflect how our incomplete memories can be filled in over time — less through unlocking something we’d forgotten than by achieving a greater understanding of, and empathy for, the perspectives of those with whom we shared those times. If you’ve ever imagined how you’d try comforting your younger self or your family about the uncertain future ahead of them, ‘Blue Heron’ may be the most emotionally devastating film of the year — and also perhaps the most comforting.”

“Blue Heron” begins streaming on the Criterion Channel on July 21.