Romería

Summer 2004 on the glistening Galician coast: 18-year-old Marina, a confident, budding filmmaker raised by adoptive parents seeks out her estranged paternal grandparents to obtain a signature required for her to attend university in Barcelona. Armed with a camcorder and her deceased mother’s 20-year-old diaries, Marina drifts into and around the emotionally unruly lives of her uncles, aunts, and cousins, who all orbit an imperious matriarch and superficially welcome her into the fold while evading her quest for answers. What were her parents really like? How did her father die? Not all families have the courage to reveal or reconcile their secrets and their shame; thus Marina—and Simón—fulfill their missions via the power and beauty of the imagination. 

★★★★ (out of 5) “Part of this movie is about the perennial question which will fascinate and defeat all of us: what were our parents like before we were born? What was it like for them to be people just like us? It is at the centre of this distinctive, intelligent, sympathetic drama… Simón still shows her usual richness, warmth and her candid, almost docu-realist filmmaking language, complicated here by a stylised hallucinatory sequence and a Super-8-type flashback section. Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes—her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian