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.      

Alcarràs

 

Director Carla Simón

Simón on the set

ensemble cast

ALCARRÀS              B                                                                                                                Spain  Italy  (120 mi)  2022  d: Carla Simón

I don’t sing for my voice or the dawn or a new day.                                                                       I sing for my friend who lost his life for me.    

The grandfather has the scythe and uses it to cut the wheat.                                                    And with the wheat he forms a sheaf and chooses the grain.                                         

I don’t sing for my voice, a clear sky, or a sea breeze.                                                                     I sing for my land, solid ground, beloved land.

—Catalan song sung by Rogelio (Joseph Abad) and his granddaughter Iris (Ainet Jounou)

Something of a surprise winner of the Golden Bear (1st Place) at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022, which also featured Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) that won the Silver Bear for Best Director, and also François Ozon’s Peter von Kant (2022), among others, this was a box office hit in Spain, yet what really stands out is the awareness and sensitivity to the subject matter and all that entails.  The first Catalan-speaking film to win the award, the shooting took place in Alcarràs, in the northeast province of Lleida in Catalonia, Spain, with its own language and unique local customs, Catalonia feels distinct from the rest of Spain, a culture that can be traced back to the 8th century (Culture and language - Catalonia), where more than 90% of the people in the region can still read and speak the language, where it is the ninth most spoken language in the European Union.  The culture has experienced something of a revival since the death of Franco, who abolished Catalan autonomy in 1938, becoming a battleground during Spain’s Civil War and a target for ethnic cleansing, leading to a contemporary Catalan independence movement, with roots in Catalan nationalism, challenging the autonomy of the nation’s current constitution.  In 2017, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont initiated an independence referendum that the Spanish government declared illegal, sending in the police to close polling stations, seize ballots, and suppress the vote, creating images of Spanish riot police beating Catalan voters (Catalan referendum: Clashes with police leave nearly 900 ...), with charges of rebellion, sedition, and misuse of public funds brought against Puigdemont and others in his government, who fled to Belgium as fugitives from justice.  Spain’s congress recently passed a highly contentious amnesty bill that may allow those exiled separatists to return (Spanish congress passes amnesty law for Catalan separatists), as advocacy for an independent Catalonia has lost popularity.  A recent Spanish television documentary, Negrers: La Catalunya Esclavista (Slavers: Catalonia and the Slave Trade), confronted Catalonia’s history in the African slave trade in the early to mid 19th century (Catalonia confronts past racism after slave trade ...), as the region was involved in the transportation of 700,000 slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, where that income was largely responsible for the industrial development in Catalonia and the economic boon in Barcelona.  It is in this backdrop that the film was made, making no reference to political divisions or any independence movement, instead it is a much quieter, more expansive exposé of rural agricultural divisions, reflecting the incursion of capitalism, where larger economic forces are driving out local farmers, who are being forced to sell and/or evacuate their land, an inevitability they can’t seem to escape, showcasing the importance of heritage and the erasure of identity, becoming a prototype for the perils of adapting to the modern age.  Not structured around any real narrative, the director establishes her own rhythm as she chooses to wander between different scenes in the daily life of family members with the idea of offering an all-encompassing social portrait, where the innocence of the young children and the magical aspects of life in the countryside are contrasted against the harsh reality the adults are facing who risk the extinction of a traditional way of life that is still struggling to survive.  

This is the second of an unfinished trilogy on Simón’s early childhood, following her debut feature SUMMER 1993 (2017), which exposed the existential upheaval of a six year old girl from Barcelona moving to the Catalan countryside after the death of her parents to live with her aunt.  In stark contrast to the heated political theater, bearing more of a resemblance to Alfonso Cuarón’s autobiographical Roma (2018), or John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), this near documentary exposé shines light on the emotional dignity and humanist aspects of growing up in Catalonia, as the director did, where her family has cultivated peaches in Alcarràs for generations.  Following a single family of farmers living a most unassuming life, Simón accents the minute details that define each of the family members, and while sharing a common familial bond, they have distinctly different personalities and character traits that slowly become familiarized with viewers, offering a single theme exposed from different prisms.  Shooting with only one camera, no single scene stands out, no needless explanations, and no daring visual aesthetic, becoming instead a collective mosaic rendered with authenticity, where there’s no trace of artifice, and like her earlier film, this is made up of inhabitants from the region, where the director’s sister Berta Pipó is the only professional cast member.  Told from an emotional remove, much of the information is conveyed indirectly, unfolding at a leisurely pace, opening with a montage of miles of orchards, with children playing in the fields inside an abandoned car pretending it’s a space ship until the loud noise of machinery interrupts their play.  Suddenly, as the car is removed by a giant industrial crane, the children feel as if their home has been taken away from them, mirroring the predominate theme of the expanding drama, as their lives must incorporate the challenge of the unexpected and live with a fear of the unknown.  With their home situated alongside a peach orchard which the family has worked for generations, they once hid the landowner’s family against Franco’s purge during the war, and in return only asked permission to farm the fields, a verbal agreement, which was all that was ever needed, but after the landowner dies, his son has different ideas, as small farms are unsustainable and the price of fruit is dropping, so without any binding written document, they are now pursuing a different direction, cutting down the peach trees to install solar panels, which “produce money without effort,” an idea that is foreign to most farmers, having only until the end of summer before the new owner uproots their lives and reclaims his land.  This is mostly a class distinction, as there are occasional protests against the corporate conglomerations that are reducing prices and grabbing up all the land, as the winds of change are in the air with the struggling farmers reeling under poverty, where the destruction of the peach orchard recalls the ending in Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, though that represented the economic demise of a fallen aristocracy.  Living under the patriarchal leadership are three generations of the Solé family, grandfather Rogelio (Joseph Abad), who admits to never having a deed, as his father acquired the land on a handshake, and his son Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) and his wife Dolor (Anna Otin), with two teenage children, Mariona (Xènia Roset) and Roger (Albert Bosch), and younger Iris (Ainet Jounou), seen playing with her two cousins in the opening scene.  Dialogue is scarce in this film, which is largely an observant study of how people once lived a simple life of hard work living off the land, which adds meaning and value to their existence, where there is a proud sense that the land will provide, which are also recurring themes in Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s The Blazing Sun (Siraa Fil-Wadi) (1954) and The Land (al-Ard) (1969).   

Not far away is the extended family, Quimet’s sister Nati (Montse Oró) and her husband Cisco (Carles Cabós), with their two young twins Pau and Pere (Isaac and Joel Rovira), who are Iris’s playmates, while another gay older sister Glòria (Berta Pipó) is living in Barcelona.  Nati and Cisco have a more open approach to solar panels, eventually ingratiating themselves with the owner, causing a deep division within the family who feel they are undermining farmers and selling them out, where Quimet, in particular, is enraged, literally disowning them, creating an emotional vacuum for Iris, who misses her cousins.  These little fractured dramas exist throughout the film, with little detours and asides, and various subplots that feel fragmentary, where there’s no emotional core holding it all together, as Quimet’s angry resentment and short-tempered behavior is counterproductive, causing unnecessary harm, making life impossible within the family, instigating constant petty disputes, even coming to blows with his own brother-in-law, which only alienates them (and us) even further.  This patriarchal meltdown is a slow burn of frustration, passed down to the disappointed son Roger, yet what really bothers them is, unlike time-honored traditions, they have relatively little say in the matter, where their petulant behavior leads to a very decisive moment when Dolor slaps them both, suggesting she’s had enough, a dramatically impactive moment that alters the social landscape without a single, solitary word being spoken.  The observant Mariona may be a stand-in for the director, seen comforting her grandfather, who blames himself for their predicament, often shielding him from the wrath of the family, as she grows equally appalled by the adult behavior, realizing they make mistakes, as there’s no effort whatsoever to attempt any sense of cooperation, where they might work out an acceptable agreement with their neighbors, who offer them the opportunity to use the land to work with solar panels rather than fruit, with other family members more willing than Quimet to adjust to the changing times, instead his stubborn, unwavering response always seems so self-destructive, where the intolerable landowners are viewed as the enemy of the people.  Oftentimes kids can be the equalizer, attending the same schools and social events, where they can bring the opposing forces together, but that doesn’t happen here, instead the sense of anticipatory fear is overwhelming, like the underlying dread of a horror movie, as we always understand that the end is near, like a coming apocalypse, with all its implications.  There are intimate moments, where the family is seen singing together or dancing, expressed in an affecting and surprisingly low-key manner, while they also attend a traditional Catalan celebration involving competitive drinking, dance, and a talent show.  In the humanist tradition of Italian neorealism, like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, and loosely inspired by Ermanno Olmi's THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS (1978), where there’s a spiritual connection to those that toil the land (though lacking Olmi's sociological complexity), the Solé family is engaged in a struggle for survival.  Quimet and Roger join protests over falling fruit prices that lower the value of the land and allow rich property owners to buy it cheaply, which sparked the violent protests in Catalonia in 2017.  The ownership of property, which is associated with historic inequities dating back to Medieval times, has always been an unresolved issue in Spain, where this plays out as a postwar, social justice alternative to Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) (2021), both offering no remedies, yet the personal becomes the political in what amounts to healing therapy for the nation, as it begins a conversation between what the past demanded and hopes for a brighter future yet to come.