Internationals Cinema: Romería (EN subs)
Orphaned when very young, 18-year-old Marina travels to the sunny, coastal city of Vigo, Spain, to finally meet her father’s family and obtain an elusive signature for her scholarship application. Marina meets with an extended clan of uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents – a group alternately warm and welcoming, prickly and evasive, wealthy and withholding. In piecing together a picture of her parents, and with her camcorder in hand, Marina navigates memories that contradict one another and heart-shattering new knowledge.
Winner of Berlinale’s Golden Bear for Alcarràs (2022), filmmaker Carla Simón delivers an intimate piece of auto-fiction that achingly portrays the unknowability of our parents. Featuring a luminous central performance from Llúcia Garcia and stunning imagery of Galicia’s rugged coast, Romería – meaning “pilgrimage” – demonstrates how filmmaking, and storytelling more generally, can be a compelling mode of working through one’s elusive past.
View the complete Internationals Cinema Breda program here.
- direction
- Carla Simón
- cast
- Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Martín, Tristán Ulloa
- duration
- 114 min
- language
- Spanish, Catalan, French, Gaelic
- subtitles
- English
