Parky At the Pictures (8/5/2026)

(Reviews of Romería; and Our Land)

ROMERÍA.

Having impressed with on debut with Summer 1993 (2017) and won the Golden Bear at Berlin for Alcarràs (2022), Catalan director Carla Simón returns with Romería. Taking its title from the Spanish word for `pilgrimage', this is another obviously autobiographical work and could be seen as a spiritual sequel to Simón's neophyte recollection of her childhood. Once again displaying an intuitively evocative sense of place, this is a deeply personal picture that relatably examines themes as bereavement, recollection, discovery, and acceptance with sensitivity and the odd hint of magic realism.

On 16 July 2004, 18 year-old high school graduate, Marina Piñeiro (Llúcia Garcia), leaves Barcelona for the Galician coastal town of Vigo in order to get some papers signed that will enable her to apply for a place at film school. As her father's name was not on her birth certificate and Fon and her mother had died of AIDS while Marina was she still a small girl, she needs her grandfather's signature to validate the family tie. Recording the ferry trip on her camcorder, Marina is welcomed by her Uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) and Aunt Denise (Celine Tyll), as well as her cousins, Nuno (Mitch Martin), Basilio (León Romagosa), and Eugene (Hans Romagosa).

The younger boys are boisterous and Marina joins them for a swim in the Atlantic off Lois's sailing boat. While he barbecues sardines on the beach, he tells his niece a bit about her parents, about whom she knows little, as she was adopted and has close bonds with her mother and grandma, who call to check she is okay. Lois claims her parents lived in an apartment in Playa Samil, but Marina's mother wrote in her diary from 1984 that they lodged in Toralla. He also says her her grandparents live on the Cíes Islands and that he will take her there to get Grandfather Alfonso to sign the documents. When the boat joins a small flotilla of vessels for a floating memorial to those lost at sea, Lois spots his parents on another boat and Nuno jokes to his cousin that she's lucky she wasn't raised here.

The next day, Marina goes exploring and a woman allows her to record the view from her window. Her mother pries about why a Catalan is snooping around and Marina avoids giving out too much information about her parents dying of AIDS. Aunt Olalla (Miryam Gallego) had just made her a new red dress in her shop and she's feeling good about meeting her relations when her young female cousins inform Martina that their mother had told them not to touch her blood. Aunt Xulia (Janet Novás) takes Martina and the kids to the beach and she wishes that her siblings had been able to raise her. She lets slip that grandmother Rosalia had tried to reach out to Martina's adoptive mother, only to be rebuffed (which she denies when questioned on the phone).

On the third day of her stay, Marina meets Iago (Alberto Gracia) on the ferry. He corrects some of the misinformation she has picked up and tells her that her parents sailed to Peru in the boat they're sitting on. He says Fon refused to accept being HIV+ was a death sentence, but Iago also surprises Marina when he tells her that her parents sold heroin, as well as using it. He and Xulia take her to the latter's cabin (where Marina is teased by the other teens for not drinking or smoking) and they show her photos of her parents with their Vigo friends. They reveal that they argued frequently and Xulia had to take her mother in when Fon went back to stay with his folks. Iago recalls that Alfonso had offered her mother 5000 pesetas to break up with his son, while Xulia breaks the news that Fon had died in 1992 and not 1987, as she had been told by her adoptive mother. She's even more discomfited when Nuno informs her that the family hid her father away so that no one knew he had contracted the disease in order to avoid the stigma of their neighbours finding out. They also declined to attend Fon's funeral.

After swimming, Marina mooches around in the garden. The sound of a chime sends her in search of pages from her mother's journal. She looks at photos on the wall of Xulia's cabin (with Llúcia Garcia and Mitch Martin playing her parents) and tries to reconcile the seeming contentment they show with the handwritten words. As she tries to sleep, Marina shines her torch on Nuno, who on the bed on the opposite side of the room.

Day Four sees the family go to the Cíes Islands. Grandma Rosalia feigns illness to stay in bed and ignores Marina when she finally gets up. Lois explains to Alfonso what his granddaughter needs, but he offers her an envelope full of cash so that she doesn't need to get a scholarship. She is reluctant to accept, as she wants to be acknowledged, but kisses him (as he makes all his grandchildren do before giving them some money) and shuffles away.

Marina feels uncomfortable at lunch, especially when Rosalia refuses to eat the dish Xulia has prepared because it was Fon's favourite. Distracted by a stranger emerging from an upstairs room, Marina is forced to dance by Xulia when they all start singing a bawdy song with the lyric, `Stop, stop, don't you dare. Go anywhere near my underwear.' Meanwhile, Rosalia has run downstairs to chide the younger cousins for swimming in her pool without showering first.

Driving home, Lois denies that his parents hid Fon away, but Marina reminds him that he wouldn't know, as he was living in France at the time. Bothered by the money, she persuades Nuno to borrow his father's car and drive her back to their grandparents' place so that she can leave the money under the doormat and empty a bin bag full of leaves into the pristine pool. Once she's accomplished her mission, Marina joins Nuno for the Vigo carnival and she dances with more enthusiasm than she had with the family.

Slipping away when Nuno hooks up with friends to take magic mushrooms, Marina spots Iago in a bar and asks him about Fon being hidden away. He assures her that it was common at a time when no one understood the disease and that his parents were trying to do the right thing. Sensing her hurt, he also reassures her that Fon was so far gone on heroin and then so sick that he couldn't have visited her in Barcelona, even if he had wanted to.

Leaving the bar, Marina follows a cat into a side alley and down to the sea. She finds a rowing boat and crosses to the island, where she climbs a rope ladder up the side of the building where her parents had lived. Finding her mother's journal, Marina sees then sunbathing on the roof and she sees then living on their own terms in their mid-80s idyll, as they frolic naked on the beach and swim. However, they are arrested for smuggling drugs on a sail boat during a storm and have tough moments when they crave drugs, but have no money.

In her diary, Marina's mother describes how she decided not to become hooked and hoped by keeping her baby that she would have something to live for. We see the gang dancing at the Vigo carnival, with a growing number being covered by white sheets to symbolise their loss to AIDS. Marina sits with her parents on the roof of their building, but Fon gets up and leaves after kissing her on the forehead, leaving mother and daughter to sit together in silence staring out to sea.

Returning the boat on the last day of her stay, Marina returns to the jetty to find Alfonso and Rosalia giving Lois and Denise hell because their granddaughter had insulted them. She makes it clear that she simply wants to apply for her grant and they all gather at the civil registry, where Alfonso and Rosalia state that Marina is their son's child and she ensures that his cause of death at the pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela is listed as AIDS. While the others are making photocopies, Marina looks out of the window and Rosalia notes she is like her father in loving the sea. As the film ends, Marina joins her family on their boat and Nuno teases her when Lois asks her to steer. Instead, she grabs back the camera and films her cousins pointing over the side at some dolphins leaping out of the water alongside them.

A fine (dual) performance by the debuting Llúcia Garcia is key to this autobiographical rite of passage, as Carla Simón works through the issues and emotions she had herself confronted as a teenage orphan of Spain's lost generation. Plot points past and present swirl around Marina, as she seeks the acceptance that will allow her to plan her future. But Simón doesn't seek to tell a conventional story, as she dots Marina's excursion with flashbacks that force her to re-evaluate what she has been told by her adoptive parents of the mother and father she had lost by the age of six. Through the former's journal, she inherits memories of the romance into which she had been born, while she gains fresh insights into the latter's restlessly reckless existence from the various aunts, uncles, and cousins who try to protect her from the truth about the actions and addictions of her parents and the shame-induced and callously self-preservatory response of her grandparents.

As Marina barely knows her blood relations, they can seem sketchily drawn, as they flit in and out of the eventful five-day sojourn. Similarly, the decision to have Garcia play Marina and her unnamed mother (alongside Mitch Martin) adds a layer of intrigue that lingers teasingly without being fully explored, as Marina (a film-maker in waiting, don't forget) tries to get to know her parents and get a glimpse of the memories that died with them by imagining herself hanging out with them.

Once again, Simón proves adept at evoking environments and locating characters within them and she is abetted here by the ever-excellent Hélène Louvart, who uses camcorder footage and hazy soft focus to differentiate between the `now and then' views the Atlantic seascapes and the bustling parade of garrulous kinsfolk. She also makes subtle use of magic realism in the final act, as the budding film-maker discovers that `cinema allows you to create images that don’t exist in your mind'. However, not even Louvart's alternately energetically louche and elegantly languid camerawork can prevent stylised set-pieces like the white-sheeted formation dance from seeming as over-deliberate as the chapter headers (even though they came, like the voiceover passages, from letters that Simón's mother had written to friends).

OUR LAND.

An issue of genuine significance is raised in Orban Wallace's documentary, Our Land. The trouble is, the notion of the right to roam is discussed in isolation from opposite sides of the divide, with the result that claims are left unsubstantiated and unchallenged, while no attempt whatsoever is made to find any middle ground from which progress might be made. Wallace will claim that he had little option if he was to give each camp a fair hearing. But it's pretty obvious where his sympathies lie in a film that has to regarded as a missed opportunity, in spite of it being filled with fascinating facts and colourful figures.

In an inventive opening segment written by Robert MacFarlane and illustrated by May Kindred Boothby, a witness tree voiced by Jodie Powell explains how the English countryside was parcelled up by William the Conqueror in the aftermath of the Norman invasion in 1066. This feudal system placed local power in the hands of the barons and landowners were given a further boost by the 18th-century enclosure acts that fenced off common land and restricted freedom of movement at the moment that Britain's economic dependency shifted from farming to industrial output and imperial trade. New money built vast estates that sustained privilege and reinforced the social divisions that remained intact even after many stately homes disappeared as death duties and maintenance costs bit in the wake of the Great War. So, where does that leave us a century on?

A familiar face from television, Francis Fulford brags about the extent and value of the Great Fulford estate in Devon, while claiming that his family are doughty survivors who have found ways to keep hold of property he has no desire to share. Such a stance irks groups like Right to Roam, who are seen organising a mass trespass on the Sussex Downs. They are address by Guy Shrubsole, the author of Who Owns England?, who reveals that the public has access to only 8% of the landscape. He jokes that 50 million pheasants are released into the English countryside each year, when there should be more room for mere peasants.

As we see the Duke of Norfolk's 21,000 acre estate in Sussex, musician-cum-conservationist Nadia Sheikh laments that a third of England is owned by the aristocracy. It annoys her that the rest of us have permission to use footpaths rather than the right to go where our fancy takes us. Slightly embarrassed by his triple-barrelled name, Hugh Inge-Innes-Lillingston considers himself the steward of the 2500-acre Thorpe estate in Staffordshire, as no one can really own the land. But his more moderate views clash with those of Nick Hayes, the co-founder with Shrubsole of Right to Roam and the author of The Book of Trespass, who wanders around the 5000-acre Highclere estate in Hampshire because he doesn't see why he should be denied `the peaceful vastness of Nature'.

John Mildmay-White took over the Flete estate in Devon from his late father in 2019 and he intends to pass the responsibility on to the son that wants and is best suited to the role. Hayes insists he's not seeking redistribution, but he remains baffled why English landowners are unwilling to share, especially when the right of reasonable access was granted in Scotland under The Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003). Fulford insists that he's running a business that free access will hamper, although Inge-Innes-Lillingston is more willing to share non-farming land, although he is unsure what the best new use could be, especially as modish rewilding schemes would be equally exclusive.

Shrubsole blames the government for doing too little to make people aware of the Country Code before complaining about pheasant shoots in privately owned woodlands, which make access to the hosting estates hazardous. Sheikh leads a trespass ramble as Fulford is hosting a shoot and gamekeepers and guests add their two pennyworth, as the lord of the manor has trouble making a dog called Sheba obey orders.

Crossing into Dorset, we call at the 14,000-acre Charborough estate belonging to Conservative MP, Richard Drax. Hayes finds a way into the grounds and leaves a copy of his book propped up against the Charborough Folly that was restored after a lightning strike and extended to 120ft in 1836 by John Sawbridge Erle-Drax using part of the £4293 12s 6d compensation that he received from the government for being forced to give up the 189 enslaved people on his Barbados plantation following the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. As if to emphasise that opinions have changed little in the intervening 200 years, Fulford expresses his pride in the empire and wishes people wouldn't try to force people of colour into country scenarios to which they're not suited.

Sheikh regrets that such colonial truths are not taught in schools and says Right to Roam offers a way for people of colour to build a relationship with land that was paid for with the blood of their ancestors. Academic Maxwell Ayamba joins a Kinder in Colour walk in Edale in the Peak District and we hear how people have come from far and wide to have their first encounter with Nature. Sheikh addresses the walkers and reminds them of their right to the land. While agreeing that everyone should enjoy the countryside, however, Inge-Innes-Lillingston warns that co-operation is vital if wildlife is to be protected for the benefit of all - and that means keeping to the paths and observing the rules. He also points out that certain animals would suffer from human intrusion, although Sheikh counters that people won't learn to love Nature and want to protect it without exposure to it. She also rightly notes that it's not individuals that have caused a crisis in the countryside but intensive farming, the use of pesticides, and climate change.

This is one of those instances where a debate would have been useful. But Wallace continues to divide and rule, as he takes us to Dartmoor National Park in the aftermath of Alexander Darwall securing the right to forbid wild camping on his Blachford estate (the last place in England where is had still been possible). This High Court ruling would later be overturned and Wallace shows the 3000-strong protest that Shrubsole and others mounted on the moor to show the extent of public dismay at the judgement favouring a hedge fund manager with links to UKIP and the Brexit campaign.

Hayes views the Darwall episode as a turning point, but Fulford avers that the activists want rights without responsibilities and demand things for free, when he would have to pay to ensure people are safe on his land. We head to Langholm in the Borders, where Sheikh and Shrubsole are leading a trespass that will allow the latter to have one foot acting illegally in restricted England and the other being free to roam in Scotland. The gathering is addressed by Andy Wightman (the author of Who Owns Scotland?), who calls for the restoration of historic freedoms.

We meet John Grant, 13th Earl of Dysart, who owns the 17,500-acre Rothiemurchus estate in the Cairngorms. He insists we belong to the land and share a duty to ensure its beauty and usefulness remains long into the future and he states that the way forward lies in making it easy for people to understand what's expected of them when they visit. Sheikh now lives on the Isle of Bute and she says she feels different because there are no restrictions on her wanderings. She extols the genius of the system by which the patriarchy has used class division to grab land and bolster their position through the stories of history. Fulford takes pride for more personal reasons because the family bloodline has gone unbroken for so long and because he can look at trees planted by an ancestor and feel a bond with them and the land they have in common.

Inge-Innes-Lillingston deplores the `us and them' nature of the debate, as he knows the land can benefit everyone. But he returns to the fact that property rights have to mean something or land could just be taken away. Sheikh, however, declares that people are being denied glorious memories and she urges us to dream about what the future could be if we all had a stake in the land.

Photographed with just about the right amount of pastoral lyricism by Jamie Wolfeld and accompanied by a folky score by Daniel Inzani, this is a well-meaning plea for common sense. Wallace allows each side to put their case, but cannily sabotages the landowners by giving Francis Fulford the latitude that he readily seizes to play pantomime villain. Richard Drax is similarly demonised in absentia. But, while often hedging his bets, Hugh Inge-Innes-Lillingston makes several cogent observations about the need to proceed with caution in moving towards the Scottish model, which is eloquently espoused by John Grant. Nadia Sheikh also makes some sensible contributions, but the Right to Roam duo of Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes often feel peripheral, with the former usually being seen/heard at public events.

The Renoiresque pheasant shoot is bound to raise hackles, but Wallace wisely avoids emotive stunts in order to focus on aspirations and practicalities. Occasionally, he flirts with the politics surrounding the concept of hereditary ownership, particularly when exploring estates with colonial connections. But this is a different issue to the Right to Roam (even though it impinges upon it) and he wisely retains the narrower focus after having planted the seed for post-screening discussion. What's not in doubt - even at a time of unprecedented socio-political division - is that we are fortunate to live in a beautiful country and everyone should have the chance to appreciate it at close quarters. The granting of access for all is not a simple matter, though, and, by siding with the rebels (Nick Hayes is credited as an adviser), the film doesn't quite make that clear enough.