Romería

With her mother’s diary in one hand and a camcorder in the other, eighteen-year-old Marina travels to the Atlantic shore where her father’s family lives. She needs an official document from her grandparents to get a scholarship for a film school.

Marina became an orphan at a young age, and the circumstances of her father’s death stay unclear. He was a drug addict and died of HIV/AIDS, but the exact timeline of his life’s end are still cloudy. During the search for her parents’s past, Marina bumps on an wall of silence with her grandparents, who rather remain silent about their son.

Director Carla Simón based the fragmented puzzle she makes in ROMERÍA on her own life. The film is, after her debut ESTIU 1993 and ALCARRÀS, the third film in which Simón researches her personal history and that of her parents – who died before her sixth birthday of HIV/AIDS. The fictionalized retelling of a girl’s life who tries to trace her roots collides with the reluctance of her father’s family to bring up the past. The brave Marina documents her own path in an attempt to reconstruct her parents’s and break the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS victims. “It is a film about the importance of family memory and about how to shape your identity”, tells Simón about her film. The diary entries guiding Marina during her search are based on letters from Simón’s own mother.

Who were our parents before their children were born? It’s a question leading to an intriguing and hypnotizing quest, and results in a film that confirms Simóns reputation as one of the most original voices in contemporary Spanish cinema.