Romería
One of the things about Marina (played by a luminous and lovely Llúcia Garcia) is that, when she comes to Vigo to meet her grandparents, it is not for money. An orphan, whose parents died many years before, Marina is looking to connect with her family, but it’s not for financial gain, but to truly become an official part of the family she’s only had tenuous connection with. She is trying to get a scholarship in Barcelona to study film, but to be able to do so, she needs official documentation that she is her father’s daughter. She has spent five days travelling to Vigo, but will she find what she’s looking for there?
This is my first experience with a film from Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón, and she definitely left a strong impression on me. Autobiographical films are a tricky proposition, and Simón threads the needle quite well. Inspired by her own experiences- and written from her mother’s letters- “Romería” is thoughtful, sometimes funny, and always moving, as well as messy. But with the latter, that can always be expected when family is involved.
It’s clear that Marina has only heard snippets of her parent’s lives, as well as read about it in her mother’s diary, which she has brought with her. She visits places they have lived, meets relatives she never knew, and is put into awkward situations along the way. Sometimes, she is correcting the narrative of her parent’s lives, and other times, she is being corrected, like when her father died; it turns out, it wasn’t shortly after she was born. One of the things that must happen for her to get the documentation necessary for her scholarship is meeting her grandparents. But sometimes, old ways of thinking don’t mesh with new ways of thinking, leaving her in a sticky situation.
“Romería” is a narratively clever structure, with the third act finding Marina on her own, almost guided by the spirits of her parents (Garcia, by the way, plays her mother in these moments). It’s a bold jump for such a personal narrative, but it is a reflection of how we connect with our loved ones after they’ve gone. I know I’ve had moments over the years where I truly feel loved ones with me in difficult, or even mundane, moments. It is a sense of reconnection that is important if we haven’t been near them physically in a long time. Simón and her collaborators capture this beautifully, as well as the sense of self that feels restored to Marina in the end. This is a moving chronicle of discovery that I connected to strongly.
