Romería

Marina is eighteen. She lost her parents at six; both died of drug addiction and AIDS. A scholarship application needs a signature, and the people who can sign are the paternal grandparents she has never met. Marina travels to Vigo, in Galicia. The subject is not finding a family but what a family chooses to remember. Her father is spoken of in this house as a shame and nobody addresses it directly; she hears a different version from every relative and none of them agree. The form is warm and smells of summer: the sea, a boat, crowded family meals. The narration occasionally moves into the past as Marina imagines it, and the film changes texture in those passages. It is set in the summer of 2004 and draws on Carla Simón's own life; her parents died for the same reasons. This is the last part of the trilogy she built around family, after Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin. Romería screened in the main competition at Cannes in 2025. Llúcia Garcia plays Marina. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet, autobiographical Spanish cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a defined plot; the film proceeds in episodes and leaves many questions unanswered.