Carla Simón's 'Romería' traces family secrets across Galician waterways in final trilogy chapter
An 18-year-old orphan searches for her biological father's roots in a new Spanish film by director Carla Simón, whose use of voiceover and handheld video blurs the line between memory and imagination.
The day's top stories, food & events — every morning at 7. Unsubscribe anytime.
For the final chapter of her semi-autobiographical trilogy, director Carla Simón transports viewers from the peach orchards of Catalonia — where her 2022 Berlin Golden Bear winner "Alcarràs" was set — to the far northwestern coast of Galicia, a region steeped in superstitions and mythologies where the ancient world was believed to end.
Like her Italian counterpart Alice Rohrwacher, whose fables of contemporary rural life infused with magical realism enchant festival circuits, Simón has established herself as a filmmaker in full ascent, one who draws the universal from the smallest gestures of daily life without forcing the metaphor. In "Romería," an 18-year-old orphan named Marina dreams of studying cinema but faces a bureaucratic obstacle: she must have her biological father's death certificate amended to claim a scholarship. This administrative hurdle becomes the entry point for an initiation journey into her parents' troubled past and an introduction to her paternal family, who guard their secrets jealously.
Simón sets much of the narrative along the Ría de Vigo estuary, between the Galician coast and the Cíes island archipelago. The film unfolds in a hypnotic rhythm evoking the tides that cradled Marina — a name choice far from accidental, given its Latin root. Marina functions less as an active protagonist than as a dreaming observer, endowed with an almost omniscient capacity to sift through the past, transforming everyday occurrences into revealing clues that help reconstruct the fragmented story of her origins.
Her primary source for this memory work is her mother's diary, read sporadically in voiceover as handheld video images — marine life, wind-battered cliffs, sailboats crossing the estuary — unfold on screen, suffused with faded blue tones and grainy, pixelated light. As Marina's attempts to invoke her past deepen, the voices of daughter and mother seem to merge until the viewer loses track of who controls the narrative.
A fervent believer in cinema's power to fill the gaps in her intimate cartography, Simón makes little distinction between fiction and reality. This merger reaches its apex near the film's end, when Simón delivers a striking blow to that boundary, drawing viewers into a labyrinth where faces and epochs blur together. The misty Galician landscape — land of druids and ghosts — becomes a natural conspirator in the film's audacious narrative ambiguity.
