Romería

Arriving in Vigo, Galica from Barcelona after being told that she isn’t on her father’s death corticate (This is an important component for her application for a university cinema course.), Marina (Lúcia Garcia) reaches out to a part of her family that she knows very little about.

When asking perfectly sensible questions about her biological parents Marina comes across intrigue, lies, deceptive memories but generally an unwillingness to say very much at all.

Through careful direction and using a number of techniques, super 8, flashbacks, Marina narrating from her mother’s extensive journals, she pieces together their life together and the effects on her and the family.

The truth about her parents is shocking though the love they had for each other is unarguable and mutually destructive. They weren’t by any means perfect being both drug dealers and users. What is more troubling to her is the attempts by some of the family to disown her father. As illustrated by the attitude of her grandparents who go as far as attempting a crude payoff rather than acknowledge they have a son.

We have been here before with Carla Simón and families and the dredging of memory through her technique of laying back and letting the actors do their bit. And it’s an impressive debut from Garcia, who at first is overawed with the so many new cousins, uncles and aunts that she withdraws only to assert herself later as the truth emerges.

Setting the film in both the late 80’s and 2004 lets Simón contrast the attitudes to drugs and AIDS in the intervening years. The former has been gleefully accepted by members of the family as a recreational essential, the latter appears to still be taboo and poorly understood - one of the younger girls says that their mother has warned them against touching Marina’s blood.

The film has a meandering dreaminess for the most part that verges on the indulgent when the film goes back to the 80’s to concentrate on Marina’s parents. Their tragedy is filmed on grainy stock, the characters played by Garcia and Mitich Martin who is Marina’s cousin Nuno in the film. The fact that Nuno and Marina appear to be developing a close relationship, is probably irrelevant but worth pondering.

Romería will be in UK and Irish cinemas om 8 May 2026.