Romería

How much does anyone really know about their parents? What can we know? And what does that knowledge leave unanswered about ourselves? 

Such questions are not uncommon in cinema, or life, but for Spanish director Carla Simón (Summer of 1993, Alcarràs), they’re particularly personal. Orphaned at a young age, she’s now made three films exploring families and the secrets they keep. Her latest is perhaps the most autobiographical: the story of an aspiring filmmaker on a journey to discover who she is, where she came from and whether she can trust her estranged relatives to tell her the truth. 

It’s a journey Simón has been on herself. Like her avatar, an 18-year-old Barcelona film student named Marina (Llúcia Garcia), the director lost both her parents to AIDS before she was old enough to form lasting memories of them, and much later connected with the extended family she’d never met. In the film, the details are more fraught: discovering, to her shock, that she’s unnamed on her late father’s death certificate, and thus unable to apply for a scholarship, Marina travels to the port city of Vigo to correct the matter, where she finds her wealthy paternal grandparents want little to do with a reminder of the dead son they regard with shame.

It’s a bold tilt into magical realism

As painful as the emotions are, Romería – the Galician word for ‘pilgrimage’ - never erupts into shouting matches or tearful monologues. (The most aggressive act involves a trash bag full of leaves getting dumped into a swimming pool.) Instead, it’s a quiet, observational film, shot with an almost documentary-like remove. Garcia, a first-time actor, plays Marina with reticent body language but inquisitive eyes, and Simón has the patience to just sit and watch with her as she takes in the warm-and-cold family dynamics that no doubt shaped her father and his relationship with her mother.

Interaction by interaction, a clearer image of her parents develops in Marina’s mind, which Simón literalises in a dreamlike third act. Ascending a rope ladder to the top of an apartment building, Marina encounters herself in the form of her mother, to whom she’s repeatedly told she bears an uncanny resemblance. (Her father, meanwhile, is embodied by the handsome cousin with whom she’s developed a chaste flirtation, played by Mitch Martín.) For Simón, it’s a bold tilt into magical realism, but the effect is never jarring – rather, it’s a moving capstone to a film which argues that the act of remembering is itself a form of magic.

In UK and Ireland cinemas now. In US theaters Jun 26.