Romería

Does a shared blood bond automatically make you family? Marina was orphaned at a young age. When she turns 18, she travels to sunny Vigo armed with a camcorder. In this Spanish city on the Atlantic coast, she will finally meet her father's family, whose signature she needs to apply for a scholarship.

There she meets a whole host of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and grandparents. The family is warm and welcoming, but also irritable and evasive, rich and distant. As Marina pieces together the puzzle and tries to form a picture of her parents, she is confronted with conflicting memories and heartbreaking new information.

Carla Simón received the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2022 for Alcarràs. With Romería (“pilgrimage”), she shares an intimate piece of autobiographical fiction that painfully shows that we can never fully know our parents. Both Llúcia Garcia and the stunningly beautiful Galician coast play a brilliant leading role in this film, which shows that filmmaking – and storytelling in general – is a compelling way to process an elusive past.