Romería

Aspiring filmmaker Marina, who lost both parents to addiction and illness when she was young, visits Galicia’s summery coast in search of her origins, and faces a haze of conflicting memories and heart-shattering discoveries. A wistful, sun-kissed portrait from award-winning Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón, based on her own life.

“Does sharing the same blood make you part of the same family?” Orphaned when very young, 18-year-old Marina travels to the sunny, coastal city of Vigo, Spain, to finally meet her father’s family and obtain an elusive signature for her scholarship application. Marina meets with an extended clan of uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents – a group alternately warm and welcoming, prickly and evasive, wealthy and withholding. In piecing together a picture of her parents, and with her camcorder in hand, Marina navigates memories that contradict one another and heart-shattering new knowledge.

Winner of Berlinale’s Golden Bear for Alcarràs (2022), filmmaker Carla Simón delivers an intimate piece of auto-fiction that achingly portrays the unknowability of our parents. Featuring a luminous central performance from Llúcia Garcia and stunning imagery of Galicia’s rugged coast, Romería – meaning “pilgrimage” – demonstrates how filmmaking, and storytelling more generally, can be a compelling mode of working through one’s elusive past.

– Sophie Tupholme

Romería was presented at CineMart in 2021.

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