Marina lost her parents at a young age to addiction and illness. When the aspiring filmmaker sets out one summer to discover her roots along the northwestern coast of Spain, she finds herself caught in a web of conflicting memories and painful discoveries.
Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is 18 and has been on her own since childhood. In order to obtain a signature for a scholarship application, she travels to Spain’s Atlantic coast to meet her paternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is drawn into a maze of aunts, uncles, and cousins, unsure whether she is truly welcome or quietly resisted. As old emotions resurface, tenderness re-emerges, and long-unspoken wounds come into view, Marina tries to piece together the fragmented—and often contradictory—memories of her parents.Romería, partly inspired by the life of director Carla Simón, is an intimate and visually striking drama in which imagination becomes a source of comfort and reconciliation. The film forms the final part of a trilogy in which Simón explores her personal history: where Summer 1993 and Alcarràs were set in the Catalan countryside, she now moves to the northwest of Spain, to Galicia, illuminating—through the scars of a searching generation—a shadowed chapter in Spanish history.
Despite the shift in setting and tone, Simón once again affirms herself as one of the key voices in contemporary Spanish cinema. Romería was a major success in Spain, drawing over 120,000 viewers in its first week, and premiered at the Filmfestival van Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or.
