Parky At the Pictures (8/5/2026)

(Reviews of Romería)

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 is listed as AIDS. While the others are making photocopies, Marina looks out of the window and Rosalia says 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.

ANALYSIS TO COME