SPA26 Romería

This eagerly anticipated drama from writer/director Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) - one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in contemporary Spanish cinema - follows an orphaned teenage girl as she meets her paternal family and reckons with her late parents’ complex and secret history. 2004. Vigo, Spain's Atlantic coast. 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has arrived to meet her grandparents for the first time, seeking their signature on some documents that she needs for a scholarship application. Raised by her mother’s sister, Marina is unfamiliar with the numerous aunties, uncles, and cousins on the other side of her family. She is immediately confronted with a past shaped by absence and long-buried emotions, hindering her ambition to reconstruct a coherent account of her father, her parents’ love story, and her place within it. Featuring a luminous central performance from Garcia and stunning imagery of Galicia’s rugged coast, Romería - meaning “pilgrimage” - intimately and sensually demonstrates how storytelling can prove a compelling mode of working through one’s elusive past and uncovering universal truths.