Romería: reality and fantasy intertwine in this ethereal drama about buried family histories

How much do we really know about our parents? This question has motivated Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón across a loose cycle of films, albeit with particular poignancy. Simón’s biological parents died when she was six years old, following Aids-related complications from needle use. This personal tragedy was sadly not uncommon during Spain’s transition to democracy, after Franco’s long and brutal dictatorship came to an end in 1975. Liberal drug use was just one expression of this relaxing of social mores. An Aids epidemic spread rapidly due to the rise in heroin use, leading to what many have since called a lost generation.

Shame, taboo and trauma have served to bury much of this under the carpet of a society still in the shadow of a traditional Catholic past. Simón has explored her family story across several autofictional films, drawing attention to an otherwise obscured part of Spain’s recent history. Her first feature, Summer 1993 (2017), follows an orphan’s move to a rural Catalan village in the wake of her parents’ death, and was followed by the Berlinale Golden Bear winner Alcarràs (2022), about a family of peach farmers facing an uncertain future. The making of these dramas, along with several experimental shorts that also tread familial ground, is imbued with a roving search for answers, so it makes sense to wrap up the cycle with a literal quest – the title, Romería, is the Spanish word for a religious pilgrimage.

In pursuit of the documents she needs to get a scholarship to study filmmaking in Barcelona, Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in the port city of Vigo to find her biological father’s death certificate. Armed with a digital camera and her mother’s diaries, she meets her estranged family and is gradually brought into the intimate fold of gatherings and beach trips. But soon enough, Marina encounters a conflicting set of narratives (and plenty of micro-aggressions) concerning her parents’ life and death. Her father’s family are firmly entrenched in the Galician middle class and clearly ashamed of his struggles with addiction. While the rest of the family are outwardly warm and kind, Marina’s grandmother (Marina Troncoso) finds her very presence an affront, and her grandfather (José Angel Egido) tries to pay her off with a large sum of money, in a bid to avoid being legally bound to her. As family secrets are gradually uncovered, the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred.

Simón has developed several signatures across her films, such as working with young untrained actors or staging loose, naturalistic scenes of family life that slowly unfold over long dinner-table lunches and at vibrant local festivities. These are very much in evidence here. Llúcia Garcia, who plays Marina as a wide-eyed, curious young woman on the cusp of becoming an artist, was scouted for the role while returning from summer camp. The family scenes are warm and lively but filmed – by legendary cinematographer Hélène Louvart – at a slight distance that is in keeping with Marina’s sense of being an outsider. At first, Marina barely speaks and struggles to express her emotions. But the camera becomes her means of expression, and her first-person perspective, seen in fuzzy DV sequences of cats sitting on a porch or coastal views, merges with voiceover readings from her mother’s diaries, suggesting that her growing artistic sensibility is intermeshed with the story of her family. In this sense, Romería is the film in the cycle that most closely resembles a Bildungsroman. Although on paper the most personal of Simón’s films, Romería can feel at times a little cold. That is, until the film’s fantastical final third.

In an interview, Simón has said that “cinema allows you to create images that don’t exist in your mind”, and this is clearly evidenced in Romería, which dramatises her parent’s romance in phantasmagorical scenes set in the sandy Cíes archipelago, in the mouth of the Vigo estuary. Just as we shift from the rural landscapes of earlier films to the windswept coastal city of Vigo, the film shifts into a surprising new gear for the filmmaker. Without wanting to puncture the airy quality of these scenes by saying too much, it is a move into magical realism that suggests a bold new turn in Simón’s filmmaking. Romería’s ethereal quality is set up earlier on in the film, when a group of small children talk about the Santa Compaña, a Galician myth about the undead. A little girl describes them as “spirits that can’t die”; in its own way, Romería brings the dead back to life.

► Romería is in UK cinemas 8 May.