Romería

 

Director Carla Simón

director on the set

Carla Simón with actress Llúcia Garcia 

Llúcia Garcia

Llúcia Garcia with Mitch Martín

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROMERĺA                  A-                                                                                                        Spain  Germany  (112 mi)  2025  d: Carla Simón

For many people, family is something that is just there, but for me those relationships had to be built. When I was very young, my parents died of AIDS, and I went to live with my aunt and uncle. I never took the family bond for granted, I observed their dynamics with a distance not everyone has. Both my biological and adoptive families are numerous: there are many siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, uncles, grandparents… I have always been surrounded by family. There is deep love, but also a load of wounds, traumas and aspects that are difficult to manage. In that mix, there is a lot of material to tell stories…

I don’t think I would have discovered much about my own family without film. In fact, Romería has ended up becoming a film about the desire to make films, even though that was not the initial idea. It was something that came up while I was writing the script: at a certain point, I realized that the main character should carry a camera. This made her a much more active character. For me it was very natural, because it was all born out of very personal experience. I think the film can be understood, among other things, as a story about the birth of a filmmaker’s gaze.

Romería is, above all, a film about memory and the need to explain ourselves, to find a story that makes sense of who we are. But it also stems from a certain frustration: what happens when you don’t have that story, when no one around you can satisfactorily tell you where you come from? In my case, film has been the tool that allowed me to invent it, to construct it for myself.

—Director Statement from Carla Simón

Your gaze pierces my eyes like a sword

—Tu mirá, by Lole y Manuel, 1976, Lole y Manuel - "Tu mirá" (1977) HD YouTube (2:43)

A stunning arthouse film that resembles the kinds of films seen in the 50’s and 60’s, when European cinema reached its undisputed artistic peak, an era of explosive innovation that birthed not only modern arthouse film, but revolutionized global storytelling.  Rejecting the Hollywood formula, these are films that prioritized ambiguity, psychological depth, and philosophical inquiry over more conventional linear resolutions, often using dream sequences or flashbacks to accentuate internalized moods and feelings.  Stylistically, this film is much more inventive than anything we’ve seen before from this director, who graduated in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Barcelona before winning a scholarship to the London Film School where she obtained her master's degree.  The third and final part of a semi-autobiographical family trilogy that began with SUMMER 1993 (2017), a tender immersion into the world of a newly orphaned six-year-old girl navigating a tangle of confusion after she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in the Catalan countryside following the death of both parents from AIDS, an experience drawn from her own childhood memories, followed by her second feature, Alcarràs (2022), an earthy, near documentary exposé of a farming family on the brink of change, told in the humanist tradition of Italian neorealism, which won the 1st Place Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022.  In this concluding episode, premiering at Cannes in 2025, the story takes place over five days in 2004, where that same six-year old girl is now eighteen, traveling from Barcelona to Vigo, an inlet port city on Spain’s northwest Galician coast, with a view of the Ría de Vigo, sheltered from the Atlantic by the Cíes Islands, in search of a family she’s never met, revisiting the unresolved questions of her own heritage, uncovering the long-buried secrets behind her parents’ lives and mysteriously concealed deaths, as she slowly learns uncomfortable secrets about her parents’ unconventional life and turbulent past.  This quietly understated, much more subjectivized indie film, largely realized by conversations and flashbacks, is mainly supported by visual style and atmosphere in a sea and sun-drenched experience that is full of warm colors, as it aims to recover the legacy of a forgotten generation, part of a Spanish historical memory that deserves to be revisited.  Simón uses the revolutionary flamenco music of Lole y Manuel as a vital sonic thread, where the specific concept of the “gaze (La mirá)” aligns with the film’s exploration of memory, perspective, and how the young protagonist reconstructs the fragmented history of her biological parents, using a poetic and emotional connection that also functions as a tribute to flamenco that her parents listened to, featured diegetically (meaning the characters can hear it within the scene), cementing the identity and emotional weight of the family’s past.  Adding to the family experience, the filmmaker’s brother, Ernest Pipó’s soundtrack fueled by piercing violin staccato notes adds an element of something bubbling under the surface, Romería (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (59 seconds).

First and foremost, Simón introduces us to newcomer Llúcia Garcia in her first role, discovered as she was returning from summer camp in an open-air casting call of 3000 young women on the street, who is simply breathtaking in the role of Marina Piñeiro, an 18-year-old orphan attempting to piece together the lives of her late parents through memory, imagination, and fragmented family stories, guided by her mother’s diary, attributed to the letters of Simon’s own late mother, Neus Pipó Simón, which often differs from what she hears from relatives, but helps bridge the gap between memory and imagination, with title cards, one for each day, asking somewhat philosophical questions (“What would I be if my father’s family had raised me?”) acting as chapter headings for her five day “pilgrimage” to Vigo, which is what the title refers to in Spanish and Catalan.  An aspiring filmmaker from Barcelona, Marina (a stand-in for the director) needs her paternal grandparents to sign an official document confirming her bloodline in order to secure a film school scholarship (as Simón did), because her father’s death certificate lists him having no children, which could either be an inadvertent error or an indication that his side of the family refuses to recognize her existence.  As she is introduced to aunts and uncles, and an army of cousins, she stays on the houseboat of Uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), his wife Denise (Celine Tyll), and their three rambunctious sons, taking a liking to the oldest, Nuno (Mitch Martín, aka Mitch Robles, lead singer and guitarist for a 70’s-inspired Madrid rock band The Boston Babies), who is about her same age.  Almost immediately, there are contradicting narratives about her late parents, who both died of AIDS when she was a child, Romeria : extrait (Cannes 2025) YouTube (1:21), where each family member only knows fragments of the story, with the memories often contradicting each other, making the truth increasingly difficult to trace, becoming a tale of hidden secrets and discovery.  Probing a hidden chapter of Spanish history, it’s important to remember the times, as the end of Franco’s repressive dictatorship in 1975 led to La Movida Madrileña, an underground countercultural movement in Madrid that led to a rebellious, hedonistic counterpoint to the ultra-conservative Catholic society, resulting in prolific drug use, as many people got hooked on heroin, immediately followed by a massive outbreak of deaths from AIDS, which was simply not talked about, as if it never happened, leading to what many have called a lost generation, beautifully documented in the early films of Pedro Almodóvar, especially ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999).  This coincides with the youthful period of Simón’s parents, with their relationship happening during that same period of the 80’s, with Spain having the highest rate of AIDS-related deaths in Europe, where it still remains hard for families to accept, as they simply stopped talking about it, so many of those stories have been silenced for decades.  Shame continues to reverberate through Marina’s entire family, as the stigma of how her father died and was ostracized continues to linger in their minds and attitudes toward her, with her bourgeois conservative grandparents still seething in resentment and anger, warning their offspring to never touch her blood as she has a “blood disease.”  Only her black sheep Uncle Iago (Alberto Gracia), himself an ex-junkie, gives Marina a more accurate depiction of the wild life and early death of her parents.

Carla Simón’s films are deeply shaped by memory, loss, and the emotional afterlives of family history, reflected in elusive family moments that we may never fully understand, where the inherently fragmented nature of memory plays a role, but the main obstacle is the stigma surrounding AIDS, which clouds these memories.  To portray the AIDS mass extinction in Spain, the director draws on a ghostly dance at a festival, with dancers covered in white sheets, like corpses, set to the macabre Spanish 1980’s hit Bailaré sobre tu tumba (I’ll Dance on Your Grave) by the Vigo punk band Siniestro Total, Siniestro Total : Bailaré sobre tu tumba ( HQ ) YouTube (3:04).  Marina learns her father actually died years later than she was led to believe, while her sternly cold and less-then-forthcoming grandparents, who have never really accepted her (“There are things that are not talked about in this family”), attempt to offer her money to halt her probing, which she refuses to accept, as her primary mission is uncovering the truth, recalling the “memory retrieval” of a recent Hungarian film, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron (2025).  To fill in the massive gaps left by her relatives’ unreliable memories, Marina reads fragments of her biological mother’s diary and uses her camcorder to reconstruct their past, where the film is an exploration of personal material, drawing from her own family and experiences, while engaging with themes of adolescence and trauma that have been central to the filmmaker’s artistic identity, yet realized through her own distinct aesthetic.  There are more visual asides here than previous films, accentuated with a visual beauty and unmatched sensitivity along with a voiceover that keeps the viewer attentive to the story, effortlessly captured through the brilliant cinematography of Hélène Louvart, who has worked closely with Agnès Varda and Alice Rohrwacher, providing poetic flourishes that amaze, including some stunning underwater sequences of naked bodies swimming through the reefs, recalling Helen Mirren’s first screen role in Michael Powell’s AGE OF CONSENT (1969).  Quite simply, this is the artist as we’ve never seen her before, a poetic and visually vibrant film, grounded in familiar narrative territory, yet told in such a distinctively different way, where it’s hard not to be drawn to the enticing visual palette.  The immensely sympathetic Llúcia Garcia is the dealbreaker, like a young Léa Seydoux, whose intoxicating screen presence drives the picture, giving us a multi-layered performance of a character who is independent and determined.  While mostly staying in the background at family gatherings, she isn’t shy about asking about her parents, especially when alone with a family member, and while many of the relatives are hard to decipher as they go whizzing by the screen, like interchangeable parts, she is the one constant that holds it all together, which is why an unexpected, late-film dream transformation is so powerful, and also deeply unsettling.

Often easy to overlook a director with a gentle touch, where this is arguably her most introspective work, Simón’s film only confirms she is one of the most singular voices in European cinema, as the relationship of Marina’s parents is only referred to, a piece of a puzzle that’s hard to understand, for decades clouded in secrecy, but it’s brought to light in the most unusual way, as she has the secret intention of visiting the places where her parents were happy, where the quest for truth gives way to the imagination, the culmination of an existential journey where pain coexists with joy.  Of all things, it’s a frisky cat that leads Alice down the rabbit hole, as Marina similarly follows an elusive cat down to the wharf, climbing into a rowboat.  At this point, the film’s grounded neorealism evolves into an immersive, dreamlike imagination, as Marina is transported back to 1983, and takes the rowboat to the private island of Toralla. Playing out like a memory poem, Marina meets her parents on the rooftop of the building where they lived together, where a startling realization is that her father is played by Mitch Martín, the actor who plays Nuno, while Llúcia Garcia is transformed into her mother, who is seen with Marina’s father traveling to remote Cíes islands by sailboat, both frolicking naked on the beach, a reflection of their free-spirited love and latent sexual liberation that recalls Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969), or before that the free-spirited sexuality of Harriet Andersson in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika) (1953), a reminder of how great cinema can be, while also showing unflinching images of their drug use, with the voice of actress Laia Manzanares narrating her story through fragments of her diary.  Money becomes an issue, as heroin is not cheap, causing the two of them to become more and more reclusive as they battle with heroin withdrawal.  Perhaps the closest films that express that freewheeling, drug-ridden bohemian lifestyle of her parents’ era are Barbet Schroeder’s debut counterculture film MORE (1969), where a young hippie couple’s visit to the idyllic island of Ibiza degenerates into unending tragedies from heroin addiction, or Philippe Garrel’s own heroin-indulgent exploits with his real-life girlfriend Nico from the Velvet Underground in I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la... (1991), which is also an impressionistic memory piece, darkly moody and self-absorbed to the point of being narcissistic, yet revelatory in its own sensory style.  What’s important here is how Marina internalizes everything she’s learned and literally steps into her parents’ lives in the 1980’s, much like Tilda Swinton in Joanna Hogg’s Caprice (1986), opening up a phantasmagorical world that exists only in the imagination.  The final flashback sequences in particular, shot in wonderfully grainy Super 8 images, add a gorgeous impressionistic texture, yet this surreal act of remembering gives the film a more personal sense of understanding that she could not get from her estranged family, allowing a deeply imaginative poetry of memory and reconciliation to unfold before our eyes.      

North Sea Is Dead Sea (Nordsee ist Mordsee)

 

Writer/director Hark Bohm

Bohm and Fassbinder (far left) in 1971

NORTH SEA IS DEAD SEA (Nordsee ist Mordsee)                       B+                          Germany  (87 mi)  1976  d: Hark Bohm

I often dream of stealing a sailboat
And simply taking off
I don't know where to yet
The main thing is that I am no longer at home
It just doesn't work with the old folks anymore.

Now let’s see
How far the journey takes us
And where the wind blows me
There must be a place somewhere
For a really wild life
And that's where I want to be now.

—Udo Lindenberg, 1976, Udo Lindenberg - Ich träume oft davon, ein Segelboot zu klau'n ... YouTube (3:17)

A coming-of-age movie from the 70’s when the Federal Republic of Germany was still a divided country, but this child-forward film is considered a classic of German youth cinema, made during a time when hardly anyone was making films for children or young people, yet this film is notable for offering unique insight into teen malaise, realistically capturing social hardships and a yearning for freedom, portraying events realistically, without sensationalizing or embellishment, where the documentary style realism is what gives the film its power, creating a genuine emotional impact, leaving a mark for being authentic, immediate, and uncommonly intimate.  Made by German filmmaker Hark Bohm, one of the early collaborators of New German Cinema who is still better known as one of the staple actors for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where he maintained a lifelong creative partnership, appearing in a dozen of his films in the 70’s and 80’s, including THE AMERICAN SOLDIER (1970), ALI:  FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974), FEAR OF FEAR (1975), THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979), THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), LILI MARLEEN (1981), and LOLA (1981), playing memorable supporting characters, often bringing a stark, realist gravity to Fassbinder’s intense psychological and social dramas.  Yet he was also a widely experienced and altogether unusual filmmaker in his own right, though his largely independent films were rarely screened abroad, many of them featuring his numerous adopted and foster children in starring roles.  Cofounding the Filmmakers’ Film Festival (Filmfest der Filmemacher) in 1979 with Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, and Wim Wenders, which gave rise to modern independent film funding in Germany, Bohm studied law and was also a university professor at the University of Hamburg, where he inaugurated the school’s film studies program, promoting film literacy, while acting as a vital bridge between the radical postwar generation of German auteurs and modern filmmakers, mentoring talent like German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin.  Written and directed by Bohm, this film focuses on young people’s everyday lives, starring his own adopted son Uwe Bohm as 14-year old Uwe, a freckle-faced kid living at home in a dysfunctional family with his working mother (Herma Koehn) and abusive, alcoholic father (Marquard Bohm, the director’s younger brother) in a dreary Hamburg high-rise housing project.  His deadbeat dad drowns his sorrows in alcohol, regularly beating both Uwe and his mother, creating plenty of unreleased, inner rage in Uwe, venting his frustrations in a series of petty crimes and bullying that he commits with a small gang he leads, starting in the schoolyard, where together they terrorize fellow misfits with derogatory racist taunts, particularly an Asian student with no friends and no father, Dschingis (Dschingis Bowakow, biological son of the director’s wife, raised as their foster son), cruelly described as a “wog,” a “foreigner,” and a “slit-eyed outsider.”  Among the many charms of the film is that it is largely spoken in Hamburg slang, which differs significantly from standard German, making it difficult to comprehend even for native Germans, much like Andrea Arnold, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and Lynne Ramsay in British cinema.

While a beloved film in Germany, it is practically unknown in North America, so this is a film that deserves rescue from oblivion.  Bohm lived in the region for three months prior to filming to research the subject and develop the screenplay with his actors, creating something original and critical, yet what’s unique about the film is the prominent casting of family members, where the two starring roles are arch enemies played by the director’s own foster children, creating an unusual sense of intimacy that carries throughout the entire picture, reflecting a time when children had to cope with being alone on the street, where the brash attitude of punk rebellion from a child’s vantage point recalls Linda Manz in Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980).  When we witness the xenophobic, bullying behavior of the gang, it recalls those self-absorbed kids from Fassbinder’s KATZELMACHER (1969), which was notable for the way he arranges a group of disaffected and bored young people a little differently each time in a line facing the camera, returning to this same image frequently, a highly stylized way to project venomous racist hatred, like a Greek chorus, evolving out of his own play, which transfigures a cinema of poverty into bleakly triumphant rites of despair.  Set in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg, the second largest city after Berlin, known as a multicultural, vibrant neighborhood with a mix of industrial history, creative art scenes, and green spaces, crossed by hundreds of canals connecting the Elbe River to the North Sea.  Much of this film is spent on the waterways, which is a distinctly different approach, creating a completely different visual landscape, beautifully shot by Wolfgang Treu, capturing several sunsets over the sea.  Evolving out of the harsh, unforgiving environment, Uwe and his gang break into a slot machine, but Uwe keeps the money for himself, which leads to disgruntled friends, who wait in vain for their cut.  Instead, he buys a switchblade, but on the way back from the store, he notices Dschingis building a raft out of scrap wood.  The next day Dschingis finds his raft destroyed, with the gang looking on, again taunting him with vile racist disdain, prompting an angry attack, with Dschingis thoroughly outnumbered, but he fights them off, and a dual ensues between Uwe and Dschingis, who ultimately prevails, causing the others to flee.  Dschingis forces Uwe to help him repair his raft.  In an attempt to repair the damage with his gang, still waiting for their cut from the robbery, and in an attempt to save face after losing the fight, finding his leadership in question, Uwe steals a car, but his joyride is cut short before the police catch him, returning him home to his father, who brutally beats him afterwards, nearly killing him, leaving him scarred and bandaged.  A raw and skillfully written social study of growing up in an impoverished working-class neighborhood of troubled youth and generational conflict, the two boys eventually overcome their animosity and bond over shared feelings of alienation, realizing that they have the same dysfunctional family problems and social burdens, with Dschingis eventually standing up for him. 

With visible signs of abuse on his battered face, Uwe decides to skip school, asking Dschingis, of all people, to notify the school for him, meeting up afterwards, refusing to go back home, wondering if he can stay with Dschingis, but his mother (Natalia Bowakow, the director’s wife) refuses, claiming it’s against the law to illegally hide a child, which only infuriates Dschingis, both of them commiserating on what to do, where they decide to run away together.  In short order this becomes a buddy hangout movie, as the second half shifts into a compelling, heartfelt adventure as the two abused and bullied boys form an unlikely alliance.  Using the repaired raft, they set out from the Port of Hamburg, but the homemade contraption proves too slow and cumbersome, finding themselves precariously positioned between tugboats, freighters, and much bigger ships that nearly run them over or capsize them, where they stand out like sitting ducks, so Uwe decides to steal a much faster dingy, which allows them swifter movement from the wind in the sails as they continue heading down the Lower Elbe, spending the night along the banks of the river, where in the morning light they find themselves near the Hahnöfersand Correctional Facility, a juvenile detention center, realizing those prisoners are hardly older than they are, suddenly imagining seeing themselves there.  Part of the controversy at the time was the film was rated unacceptable for viewers under age 16, due to the harsh depiction of reality, yet those same viewers could watch extremely violent action thrillers.  What this amounted to was political censorship based on outdated ideals about protecting children.  From stealing boats to knife-wielding stick-ups and kung-fu fights (both have Bruce Lee posters in their rooms), it’s difficult to watch the casual schoolyard racism and brutal honesty about 1970’s social environments, yet Bohm sustains a compelling theme of alienation.  As the two boys continue downstream, approaching where the mouth of the Elbe meets the North Sea, they are approached by a police boat, but manage to escape through the shallow reeds in a side channel, quickly abandoning their boat to hide onshore, breaking into a kiosk at night as they were desperately hungry, where the two of them resemble a modern day version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where life along the river presents everpresent dangers.  Forced to continually evade police with narrow escapes, the final shot is an image of their boat sailing down the river, seen against the setting sun, away from the hopelessness of everyday life, while a poetic refrain from Udo Lindenberg’s song leads from a blue sea to a black screen with no end credits, Ich träume oft davon, ein Segelboot zu klau'n // Udo Lindenberg YouTube (2:26).  Engaging and suspenseful, never resorting to a moralizing, yet artistically impactful, the film deals with the miserable living conditions suffered by many young people from the postwar working-class generation, becoming a believable adventure film that addresses the feelings of disaffected youth growing up without love.    

Note

Hark Bohm died of natural causes surrounded by his family at the age of 86 in November 2025.