US Edition‘Romería’ Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents’ Obscured Past in Carla Simón’s Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage
- Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón premiered her third feature, Romería, at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, telling the story of 18-year-old Marina’s journey to meet estranged paternal relatives on Spain’s Atlantic coast.
- Marina, an orphan whose parents died of AIDS-related causes in the early 1990s, must secure a notarized kinship recognition from her paternal grandparents to complete her filmmaking scholarship application.
- The film intertwines Marina’s 2004 exploration of Vigo and the Cíes Islands with narrated extracts from her mother’s 20-year-old journal, revealing her parents’ restless youth and drug dependency.
- Romería employs camcorder-shot video diaries and natural camera work by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, with a purposeful shift to magical realism bridging Marina’s memories and grainy flashbacks of her parents’ turbulent past.
- The film closes Simón’s family-centered trilogy by offering a layered, wistful memory piece that acknowledges unresolved family stigma and deepens her arthouse profile without a clear resolution or homecoming.
17 Articles
17 Articles
Carla Simón’s ‘Romería’ Gets 11-Minute Ovation In Cannes Debut
Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón made her debut in the Cannes Film Festival competition on Wednesday afternoon, world premiering her latest work, Romería, to an 11-minute ovation. Simón, directing from her own screenplay, here tells the story of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old who was orphaned at a young age, and must travel to Spain’s Atlantic coast to obtain a signature for a scholarship application from the paternal grandparents she ha…
Carla Simon Closes Her Family Trilogy in Cannes: “Romería” Is Born of the Frustration of Not Knowing Much About My Parents”
By car, on a six-hour journey, with his boy and his midwife. This is how Carla Simón (Barcelona, 38 years old) physically arrived in Cannes. However, the film and vital road, which in his case are intricate to the heart, has been much longer. His first three films, to which should be added the short Letter to my mother for my son (2022), are an intimate and fictional journey to his own existence.
Cannes 2025: with "Romería", Carla Simón Signs a Delicate Autobiographical Survey
Wednesday afternoon, in Competition of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the young Spanish filmmaker moved with a sensitive drama about an 18-year-old girl in search of her biological parents in Galicia. ...
‘Romería’ Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents’ Obscured Past in Carla Simón’s Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage
Spanish director Carla Simón continues gently to explore jagged crevices of memory and family in her Cannes-selected third feature 'Romería.'
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