Working Memory: A Conversation with Sophy Romvari

Perhaps this is self-evident, given your family background, but what sparked your interest in filmmaking?

It seems obvious, but it wasn’t. My dad took a lot of photographs and videos, but for a long time I didn’t know this tendency of his was connected to his background in cinematography. My parents and all my brothers immigrated to Canada from Hungary before I was born, so I was the only first-generation Canadian in my family. I didn’t really know my grandparents, and my parents didn’t bring much of their past with them, so I didn’t grow up around what you would expect. My parents never talked about the kind of work my dad and grandpa used to do, but they always pushed us to pursue creative paths. They wanted us to be artists, not lawyers or doctors. In high school, I tried all different kinds of arts—like painting and acting—but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It never occurred to me that I might want to make films until I took a university film class. That’s when it clicked, and I decided to switch to film school. 

You talk about feeling out of touch with your Hungarian culture. Your work is focused on testimonials and your own personal history, so I’m wondering if you were motivated by a desire to address your sense of disconnection.

There’s an investigative bent to my filmmaking in that it’s usually about uncovering and digging deeper into the identity—or the lack of identity—I felt growing up. I was in an unconventional immigrant household, and my parents weren’t interested in socializing. They occasionally made Hungarian food, and Hungarian was my first language, but my upbringing wasn’t attached to Hungarian culture beyond that. My parents were more interested in being this isolated hippie family who made art and lived in the forest.

A lot of my work, beginning with Nine Behind, is a result of me wondering what it would have been like had I had a greater connection to my Hungarian culture and about why things turned out the way they did in my family. Filmmaking has given me an outlet to work out the causes and effects of different events in my life.

In Remembrance of József Romvári, your conversation with István Szabó is used to contextualize your grandfather’s life and work. Was your family already in contact with him, or did you have to seek him out?

Remembrance was commissioned by Rob Sweeney of Kino Lorber, who reached out to me asking if I had any relationship to József Romvári. Kino was putting out a three-disc restoration of István’s films, so he had noticed my grandfather’s name. When the connection was made, he asked me if I wanted to make a short film about my grandpa to include as part of the special features, since he was the production designer on all three films included in the release. That’s how I was able to get in contact with István. I spoke to him on the phone, because he doesn’t have a computer. Interestingly, he also taught my dad in film school, because at the time there was only one film school in Hungary. Speaking to István was an emotional experience because it highlighted the riches I could have gleaned from my grandpa had I grown up around him.

Many of your films are fiction-documentary hybrids. What attracts you to this approach?

In Pumpkin Movie I began peeling back the layers of separation between myself as a character and myself as a real person—though this also came about coincidentally, because of the limitations under which I was working. Because I had no budget, I decided to act in the film, and I recruited my friend Leah, who doesn’t have an acting background. I decided to not have a script, so I simply had us list out the encounters we might want to reference without memorizing them, to create natural or documentary-like performances.

Chris Boeckmann, who was then working at the True/False Film Festival, saw the film on somebody’s Twitter and programmed it in 2018, which changed my life. It was at True/False where I finally saw a lot of films that were playing with similar hybrid techniques that I wasn’t consciously aware I was employing, but that squared with my sensibility and my preferred mode of getting at a kind of truth. I also developed that mode organically, since one thing I already have—free of charge—is myself as a vessel to create character and my experiences to supply narrative in a way that’s honest. But it wasn’t until I started screening my films at festivals and having them categorized and grouped into shorts programs that the hybrid label became attached to my work.

Still Processing deals with some painful family history. When did you decide you wanted to broach this subject?

I came up with the idea for the film when I was making Nine Behind, but at the time I didn’t think it would ever happen, because of how difficult it would be for my family and me. I knew there were a lot of photographs of us siblings, and I’d seen a few of them. My dad would send me a new one for my birthday every year. The concept was simple—document the process of seeing all of these photographs for the first time—so it didn’t change much over the years, and I was able to follow through on completing the project because I had applied for my master’s at York, which was the perfect way to hold myself accountable and go through it in a more thoughtful manner.

My parents initially didn’t understand how I could make a film about this experience in our lives without going into detail and being too exposing. It took a while to get them on board. But I wasn’t going down the road they thought I was. I wanted the film to be based on images and the emotional experience of relating to images, but it was difficult for them to imagine that, so they were reluctant. It was important for me that I had their permission because in my eyes the film is for them. When I finally showed them the film after all these years, they loved it and it broke a lot of barriers for them.

I love the layers of introspection conveyed by the film, especially your use of subtitles to communicate thoughts you’d prefer not to speak out loud.

I knew there needed to be this extra layer of contextualization. At first, I thought I’d record a kind of therapy session while watching the film and have it work like a director’s commentary. The subtitles were a way of giving people an entry point into what I was thinking while making the film.

You’re clearly comfortable in front of the camera and often appear in your own films, but I wonder how you approached your performance in Still Processing, considering the very real emotional experience you capture in the pivotal scene when you unbox the photographs.

I grew up being around my dad’s camera all the time. When I was a teenager he’d try to get me out of bed with his camera turned on recording everything. I’m sure on some level I’m different when the camera is on me, but I think I manage to ignore it quite well. I mine that ability by making sure my shoots are intimate. For Still Processing, it was just me and my director of photography, Devan Scott. We’d set up the camera together knowing the frame we wanted to shoot, and he would check out, like put on headphones and listen to music to be as non-present as possible. Shooting digitally helps in this regard because it allows us lots of time. In the unboxing scene, we recorded for almost forty-five minutes and had two cameras running. We didn’t do any second takes, but after I was done with my crying and gathered myself, I was like, okay, let’s get some inserts. I don’t want to pretend the camera isn’t there, but it’s a matter of striking the balance between acknowledging the artifice and trying to show reality as best I can.

Are you working on any new projects?

After all this talk about hybrid filmmaking and documentaries, I’m now writing my first fiction screenplay, which will be my feature debut. I also shot a short documentary in December that I’m currently editing, but the next big project that I’m putting my all into is the feature.