ROMERIA
(director/writer: Carla Simon; cinematographer: Hélène Louvart; editors: Sergio Jiménez, Ana Pfaff; music:(Marina’s father) Ernest Pipó; cast: Llúcia Garcia (Marina), Mitch (Nuno. Marina’s cousin), Tristán Ulloa (Lois, uncle), Alberto Gracia (Marina’s father Alphonso), Sara Casasnovas (Virxinia), José Ángel Egido (Grandfather), Marina Troncoso (Grandmother); Runtime: 112; MPAA Rating: NR; producer: María Zamora; MK2/Elastica Films; 2025-Spain/Germany- Spanish, Galician, Catalan, French-with English subtitles)
“The film intelligently questions family values and what children really know about their parents.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The Barcelona-born Spanish filmmaker Carla Simon (“Summer 1993″/”Alcarràs”) is the auteur of this anguishing family drama. The title refers to a religious pilgrimage. It’s an autobiographical fictionalized story shot on a camcorder by the great French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, as if a documentary. The story is based on the director’s trip to Galicia to discover secrets about the death of her own parents.
Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is an easy-going Barcelona-living orphaned 18-year-old high school grad who visits in 2004 the Spanish coastal city of Vigo to meet the bourgeois family of her dead biological father. Her father (Alberto Gracia) died in 1992 of AIDS, after splitting with her mom whom he never married. She was born out of wedlock.
Marina uses her mom’s diary to learn about her father’s family. We learn her father comes from a wealthy and conservative traditional family, who didn’t want to acknowledge their son was a heroin addict and lived as a hippie with a free-spirited woman. Marina is greeted in Vigo warmly by her uncles and aunts, but more warily by her conservative grandparents (José Ángel Egido & Marina Troncoso). They let her stay with them.
Marina learns she needs official paperwork notarized about her birth in order to get a grant to study cinema. Her shock comes when she learns her father’s family never recognized her existence and she’s not in the death document. This means getting her suspicious grandparents to take a deposition that their grandson was her father. Their questioning attitude soon gets under Marina’s skin and she reacts angrily to them.
The film intelligently questions family values and what children really know about their parents.
It played at the Cannes Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 7/24/2025 GRADE: B
dennisschwartzreviews.com