Romería

Seventeen-year-old Marina looks at the world through her small digital camera. She takes it with her to Vigo, the Galician port city where her parents once lived. All she really needs is a document for a scholarship, but the stay turns into a search for where she comes from. The encounters with relatives stay cool; nobody wants to talk about the past. Little by little Marina grasps that there is no single truth, only different ways of remembering.

The director Carla Simón, who reshaped European family cinema with “Summer 1993” and her Berlinale winner “Alcarràs”, goes a step further with “Romería”. This palpably autobiographical work, which screened in competition at Cannes, again takes on the principle of family — that fragile weave of closeness, silence and repression — but this time it is anchored as a precise portrait of Galicia in the 1990s, the era of drugs and alternative ways of living that followed the end of the Franco dictatorship. Out of it Simón builds a poetic piece of remembrance. Archive images are woven into staged scenes, periods overlay one another, the past returns almost bodily. “Romería” becomes family chronicle and collective memory at once: an intimate, tender patchwork and a piece of work on Spain’s collective memory, dedicated also to the victims of the AIDS epidemic, whose traces were long kept quiet in many family histories.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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