‘Romeria’ review: Carla Simon’s third, semi-autobiographical feature is ‘pensive and rather lovely’

Dir/scr: Carla Simon. Spain/Germany. 2025. 112 mins.

Orphaned at a young age and raised by her mother’s family in Barcelona, 18-year-old Marina (Llucia Garcia) has never met her father’s extended clan in the city of Vigo, in Galicia. But to apply for a scholarship to study cinema, she needs an official form signed by her grandparents. Camcorder in hand, she travels to Spain’s stormy Atlantic coast to explore her roots and discover whether sharing blood is the same as being part of a family. With her pensive and rather lovely third feature, Carla Simon returns to the autobiographical material that inspired her first film, Summer 1993. While this picture lacks the guileless immediacy of the child’s-eye view of her first two films, Romeria demonstrates once again that Simon has a rare gift for capturing the unpredictable, mercurial beast that is the family. 

Simon has a rare gift for capturing the unpredictable, mercurial beast that is the family

Romeria premieres in the main Competition at Cannes, after Simon’s previous two films, Summer 1993 and Alcarras, won top prizes at Berlin (the Golden Bear for Alcarras, and the Generation KPlus prize for Summer 1993). While Summer 1993 and Romeria are both inspired by Simon’s own life (she was orphaned as a young child, losing both parents to AIDS contracted as a result of their heroin addiction), this latest film shows Simon’s alter-ego on the cusp between child and adult: the camera that she carries is a link to her future self. Engrossing, perceptive and quietly affecting, this should be a title of interest for both distributors and further festivals. 

As Marina, Garcia has a gamine, almost childlike quality. She spends much of the early part of the film peering through her curtain of a fringe and loitering, slightly awkwardly. on the periphery of her father’s family, as if she hasn’t quite learnt their rhythms and rules. As in her other films, Simon’s dialogue plays out in multiple languages. Marina’s father’s wealthy family speaks Spanish; on the phone with her adoptive mother, Marina speaks Catalan. We also hear French (one of her uncles and her cousins lived there for a time) and Galician.

Initially, because the character listens so intently to the stories about her parents, teasing out the inconsistencies in the family narratives, it’s tempting to assume that Marina is a passive observer. But here, the camera is crucial: it’s a device that allows Marina to be active in the telling of her own story. Her camcorder footage – flat and fuzzy and authentically cheap-looking – is woven into the film. In a way, this is a picture about the birth of a filmmaker as much as it is about unravelling the secrets of the past. 

And there is no shortage of secrets. Garcia’s expressive face silently registers the kind of seismic emotional shift that undermines the foundations of her childhood when she learns that her father died in the early 90s rather than the late 80s, leaving a full five years in which he failed to meet her or be part of her life. The house of her grandparents, described by one of her uncles as “terrible” people, reveals another shocking truth about the fate of her father.

While Marina is connecting with her father’s side of the family, her mother is a presence in the film through entries in a diary that she kept at the time (the words are those of Simon’s own mother, taken from the letters that she wrote to friends and family). The decision, in the final third of the film, to introduce Marina’s parents as characters on screen rather than ghosts just outside of the frame is the picture’s biggest gamble. The pair are played, slightly distractingly, by Garcia and Mitch, who also plays Marina’s charming stoner cousin Nuno. It’s a story segue which just about works, showing Marina’s parents finally taking shape for their daughter as three-dimensional people rather than elusive, half-drawn sketches.