Romería

What makes us what we are? This is the eternal question of nature vs nurture that Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón asks once again. All her films so far have been at least partly autobiographical and deal with her difficult upbringing. With Romería, she has gone the furthest so far, both in an emotional and the filmmaking craft sense.

The year is 2004, and the 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) comes to the town of Vigo in Galicia to visit the family of her late father Alfonso, armed only with her mother’s conveniently extensive journal. She needs the family to recognise her as their own so she can get a film school scholarship, which might be a problem. Namely, both Alfonso and Marina’s mother died of AIDS due to infected needles from heroin use and the well-to-do family never supported their relationship. Alfonso’s family even tried to hide him from the world, and admitting such an error might not be an option for them.

While the uncles and aunts greet her warmly in their own different ways, the cousins are not so friendly. Nuno (Mitch Martín), the son of Lois (Tristán Ulloa), however, certainly is and is willing to help Marina because he also feels the need to stick it to the bourgeois family. The thing is, the grandparents are such hard people that all of their offspring are broken and traumatised in different ways. As her mother was before, Marina now might be the only one unaffected by the family darkness.

That does not mean that everybody in the family wants her close or would instantly accept her name on the family documents. Also, the pieces of truth about her father, her mother and their life in Vigo in the 80s, which is Marina’s secondary quest, might differ depending on whose mouth they come from and might differ greatly from her mother’s journal. But Marina is not a person who gives up quickly, although it takes a serious emotional toll.

Combining slick digital look with the look of various antique formats, from DV to super-8, Simón creates her very own smooth blend. Having Hélène Louvart as the cinematographer certainly helps. The details of the period remain largely unobtrusive, although the iconic look and ringtone sound of a Nokia 3310 is a must for an early Noughties period piece. Finally, the actors' interplay is fluid enough to compellingly channel the interaction between the characters in the times before smartphones took over, although the nostalgic vibe remains absent, which suits the tone of the film quite well.

The question of structure proves to be key, as Simón’s script unfolds across five chapters, each covering one day Marina spends with her relatives. In the beginning, Romería – whose title comes from the Spanish word for pilgrimage – touches on the common ground of the situation when an almost adult person gets to know the relatives that the person knew of, but did not know, and the resentments connected to such a situation. Surely, it cannot last for long, and the decisive moment of whether the filmmaker makes or breaks comes during the culmination of two consecutive sequences. Simón does well to serve us a bit of a red herring of magic realism, before taking us to a flashback that proves to be her big victory.

Against expectations, coming from the fact that the flashback is actually an adaptation of sorts of the journal Simón has teased viewers with from the get-go and it is powered by a blunt instrument voice-over, it could stand as a short film on its own. On the other hand, the editors Sergio Jiménez and Ana Pfaff have a demanding task to keep everything together as a compact whole, but they achieve it.

It is obvious that Simón is growing as an auteur, which can be also noticed from the festival journey of her films. Summer 1993 (2017) was a promising feature debut, and [filmAlcarràs[/film] (2022) was be tailor-made for reaping festival awards, and both of those premiered and triumphed in various sections of Berlinale, Romería had a Cannes competition premiere and is enjoying a festival tour – we caught it at Sarajevo, albeit with no awards yet. It is also the filmmaker’s most accomplished and most hearty film, coming from the same cycle as her previous feature. There is a risk that the “auto-fictional” path Simón has taken is nearing the end, and that she might have to come up with a different one soon, but there are reasons to be excited about her next moves.

Reviewed on: 21 Aug 2025