A Journey into a Mysterious Past with Carla Simón's Semiautobiographical Romería

ROMERIA / Pilgrimage 

(Carla Simón, Spain, 2025, 111 minutes) 

With a pack on her back and a camcorder at the ready, 18-year-old Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia, who recalls Léa Seydoux) sets out in 2004 to track down her biological father's death certificate in order to apply for a scholarship to study film in Barcelona. And to solve the mystery of his relatively short life. 

Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) uses Marina's mother's diary entries, which cover a crucial four-year period, as an organizing principle, augmented by Marina's video images (32-year-old Catalan-Valencian actress Laia Manzanares reads the entries in voiceover). 

Things get off to an awkward start when Marina visits the civil registry in Vigo and finds no record of her birth (her mother also died when she was young, but earlier). A clerk tells her they can correct the record with a sworn affidavit from her grandparents, so she goes on a sailing trip with her cousin Lois (Sex and Lucia's Tristán Ulloa, below), his wife, and their sons. Their final destination: her grandparents' home. On the phone, she tells her adoptive mother these people seem rich, though she isn't after money.

On land, she connects with aunts and an uncle. Though they're welcoming, she tells her mother she finds them odd, possibly because there's something they aren't telling her, like why her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido from Mondays in the Sun) warned her adoptive parents to stay away. A younger cousin also says they were told not to touch her, most likely because her father died from AIDS, though that's not how HIV+ transmission works. 

As Marina learns more about her parents, she finds that a lot of it isn't good, but also that his family only made her father Alfonso's final years harder. 

Aside from a few revelations, she mostly meets with evasions, especially from her grandparents. She finds an ally, however, in her cousin Nuno (fellow newcomer Mitch Martin, here billed simply as Mitch), though their physical chemistry isn't exactly ideal since they're, you know, cousins, but their relationship is convivial, conspiratorial, and thoroughly Platonic. 

Then she meets a scruffy street cat, who leads her down a dark street and away from a bustling bar, at which point she steps into an entirely different realm. Considering the realism of the rest of the film, this extended sequence which takes place in the mid-1980s, isn't unwelcome, though it moves things in an entirely different direction, one filled with sex, drugs, full frontal nudity, and ghostly choreography as the diary entries Marina has been reading come to vivid, feverish life. 

Simón, in her second semiautobiographical feature, returns to the real world at the end, and La Chimera DP Hélène Louvart handles both modes with ease. Marina sets out to find a document and to solve a mystery, but she also forces her family, as much through her resemblance to her mother as to her actions, to confront their past--and gets in a little harmless revenge, too--though I didn't realize until I looked up the credits that the diary entries aren't fictionalized, but come from letters written by Simón's mother, Neus. 

Romería follows 2017's Summer 1993 in which Simón revisits the period in her childhood just after she lost her parents and as she adjusts to her new adoptive home. (I haven't yet seen 2022's Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, which explores her Catalan heritage, but I plan to watch it next.) 

Simón could have become a novelist, or even a therapist, as a way of dealing with her past, but she became a filmmaker, just as Marina plans to do. Fortunately, neither film is solipsistic or self-pitying, not least when the stigma around AIDS persists, though not to the same degree as in the 1980s, during Spain's La Movida Madrileña, which gave rise to an increase in intravenous drug use and HIV+ infection.

I was particularly impressed by the naturalistic performance of Llúcia Garcia, who Simón's crew plucked from obscurity as she was returning from summer camp. She handles two roles with grace and seems comfortable with nudity and semi-nudity, since there's a lot of both. It's hard to believe Romería represents her first professional credit. I hope it won't be her last. 

For all the time spent with biological family in the film, though, a significant subtext lies mostly behind the scenes, since Simón's adoptive brother composed the score, her adoptive sister appears in her films, and her adoptive parents read her screenplays and watch the edits. If Marina appears uncomfortable around her blood relatives, the making of the Romería, in addition to Simón's previous films, honors the loving adoptive families who help make the dreams of one-time orphans come true.

Romería plays SIFF Film Center through Sunday, Aug 23. Images from Janus Films via The New Yorker (Llúcia Garcia), the IMDb (Garcia with Tristán Ulloa), The Moveable Fest (Garcia with Mitch Martin), and Variety (Credit: Quim Vives; Garcia with Ulloa and Marina Troncoso).