Carla Simón returns to that intimate and delicate terrain where cinema and memory intertwine with moving precision. If Summer 1993 explored childhood and Alcarràs delved into familial bonds threatened by progress, here the director comes back with a film that beats to the rhythm of the past: an emotional journey into the heart of family, loss, and untold memories. With a restrained tone full of personal resonance, Romería stands as her most introspective work to date. The story follows Marina, an 18-year-old who, orphaned since childhood, decides to travel from Barcelona to Vigo, on Galicia’s Atlantic coast, in the hope of reconnecting with her father’s family—relatives she never truly got to know. Along the way, she is also searching for official documents she needs to begin her film studies. But the true motivation behind her journey is not bureaucratic, but emotional: Marina wants to understand where she comes from, and what part of that painful, silenced, complex past still lives within her.

Simón weaves a film where questions weigh more than answers. What stories does a family choose to tell? Which ones remain buried—out of shame, fear, or sorrow? Romería explores those gaps and fills them with a compassionate yet clear-eyed gaze, one that never judges but also refuses to idealize. The story unfolds in 2004 but is permeated by echoes of another era: the youth of Marina’s parents, marked by heroin use, the stigma of AIDS, and the discomfort of a society that preferred to close its doors rather than face suffering. Beyond its narrative arc, Romería functions as a symbolic space of reunion. The protagonist becomes a bridge between two times, two generations, two truths. Through her mother’s diary—used to structure the film into chapters—and digital camera footage reminiscent of Simón’s own first trip to Galicia, the film takes on an almost documentary quality, as though the past were being reconstructed not through certainty but through fragments. It’s a deeply cinematic gesture: a film that doesn’t seek to capture objective truth, but something more elusive and poetic—like the feeling we get when looking at an old photograph or standing in a place we somehow recognize without ever having been there.

One of the film’s most powerful moments is the transition into a flashback set in the 1980s, where the story takes an unexpected turn. Instead of adhering strictly to realism, Simón introduces dreamlike elements that reflect how Marina idealizes her parents. The young lovers appear suspended in time, in a sunlit, sensual Galicia that soon darkens. This rupture in Simón’s usual tone—hinting at magical realism, with improbable choreographies set to Spanish punk—doesn’t clash but enriches the film. It becomes a lyrical representation of the desire to revive what’s been lost, to understand the incomprehensible.

What’s most admirable about Romería is its emotional honesty. The film avoids sentimentality and doesn’t force artificial climaxes. The encounters between Marina and her relatives are full of awkward silences, restrained gestures, and human contradictions. There is tension, but also a genuine desire for connection. And, as in real life, those connections are not always clear or fulfilling. Some characters resist looking back; others cling to memories. Marina, on the other hand, chooses to face them head-on.

In this journey, the notion of a romería—a pilgrimage—takes on a fuller meaning. It is not just a physical trip, but a spiritual one. A pilgrimage not to a religious shrine, but to the emotional roots of a fragmented identity. And while Marina doesn’t find all the answers she seeks, she gains something even more valuable: the chance to tell her own story, in her own words, through her own language. In that gesture, as intimate as it is cinematic, lies a form of healing. With a gaze that shuns the grandiose but embraces the profound, the director offers a subtle and luminous film, where the past is not a burden, but a compass.