NZIFF: Romeria (2)

One of the standouts of Cannes 2025, Carla Simón’s personal exploration of the restlessness of a young woman without parents is a poignant example of the healing power of cinema.

After winning the Berlin Golden Bear with Alcarràs (2022), Spanish director Carla Simón looks back into her own memories and heals pains from the past with her spellbinding third feature film Romería.
Eighteen-year-old Marina is an aspiring film student who sets out to trace the fate of her biological parents - who both died during the HIV epidemic of the late 1980s, early 1990s. Raised in Barcelona by her maternal grandparents, Marina visits her paternal family in Galicia, in order to obtain the paternity recognition documents that would allow her to apply for a scholarship. Guided on her journey by the pages of her mother's diary, Marina revisits her parents’ story of love and addiction...

Simón brushes with delicate touches the dynamics of a difficult family reconciliation and the motions of post-adolescent desire (the attraction between Marina and her cousin). While she initially draws from the tropes of summertime family dramas, Simón then turns Romería into a dreamlike fable where the past comes alive through the present thanks to the simple, yet enchanting true magic of cinema.— Paolo Bertolin

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