In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s death. The film is an autobiographical project from Simón, and received wide praise for its raw depiction of childhood trauma and Simón’s ability to capture the intimacy and perspective of a young child living in the flux of trauma. With Romería, Simón has crafted something of a follow-up to Summer 1993. This time, the film follows Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old who travels to the coastal city of Vigo in search of information about her father. Marina is hoping to receive a scholarship to study cinema at university, but is only eligible if both her parents died of AIDS. However, her father’s family, embarrassed by their son’s drug use, has hidden the true cause of his death and refused to acknowledge Marina on his death certificate.
Throughout Romería, Marina slowly learns more about her father from the perspectives of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Much like Summer 1993, it’s clear Simón’s writing is heavily influenced by her own experience. Interwoven with the difficult conversations of Marina’s father’s demise are excerpts from her mother’s diary, providing the context and closeness Marina has spent much of her life craving. These scenes of her parents’ life reflect the high points of Romería, as the intimate portraits of both good times (falling in love while sailing off the coast) and bad (heroin withdrawal, storms that damage the boat) give Marina the sense of connection to her father that she seems to be seeking but not receiving from his family. In a similar scene, Marina visits a nightclub, where a dance routine to “Bailaré sombre tu tumba” culminates in the ghosts of her friends and family members’ presence.
Unfortunately, the quality of these provocative flashbacks sets a standard that isn’t achieved by the rest of the film. The interactions Marina has with her father’s family come off as merely functional and expository, delivering the necessary information to support the film’s narrative arc but failing to conjure anything more intimate or revealing. Similarly superficial is Simón’s visual approach, which strives for a kind of impressionistic minimalism through its cinematography, replete with out-of-focus shots that seek to blanket the proceedings in a certain ephemerality, perhaps in an attempt to rhyme with the erasure of her father’s true life by his parents. But as with the film’s attempts at establishing interpersonal dynamics, its visuals feel more flat in their calculation, leaving little of substance beneath the sheen. All of this leaves Simón’s film with the lingering impression of a personal passion project that has failed to fully transcend its intimate genesis, despite the director’s best attempt to zhuzh the material with flits of style. And at Romería’s end, where conflict between Marina and her grandparents finally comes to a head, the film puts a bow on itself in the form of a too-tidy, feel-good ending that provides viewers with easy resolution and a hopeful portrait of familial friction and disjuncture.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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