Romería (2025) by Carla Simón

Marina is 18 and needs her parents’ death certificates to apply for film school. Both parents died young — her father from heroin addiction and AIDS in the early 1990s, her mother not long after — leaving Marina to grow up in Barcelona far from her biological family. She travels from Barcelona to Vigo, Galicia, with her mother’s diary. Her father’s family is upper-middle-class, welcoming and bickering simultaneously, and deeply reluctant to discuss who her parents actually were. Only Uncle Iago, a sidelined family member, will speak openly about her father’s addiction and what her parents’ lives really looked like. The third and final chapter of Simón’s family memory trilogy. Written by Simón and Neus Pipó Simón, based on Simón’s mother’s diaries. Cinematography by Hélène Louvart. Score by Ernest Pipó. Produced by María Zamora through Elastica Films. International sales: MK2 Films. World premiere in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Spanish theatrical September 5, 2025. Budget €3.2 million. Worldwide gross $2,446,776.

Simón won the Best First Film and Grand Jury Prize at Berlinale 2017 for Summer 1993. She won the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2022 for Alcarràs. Romería competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2025 — completing a festival trajectory across all three major European film festivals within eight years. The film generated 6 Goya nominations, 13 Gaudí nominations, 6 Feroz nominations, 5 Cinema Writers Circle nominations, and nominations at Sydney, Miami, and Sant Jordi. Llúcia Garcia — found on the street during a wide-ranging casting call, making her screen debut — won the Gaudí Award for Best New Performer. The film was described by multiple Cannes reviewers as Simón’s best work to date. Variety called it “wistfully moving” and positioned it as certain to “boost her rising arthouse profile.” Metascore 74. Worldwide gross $2,446,776.

• The film’s third act — in which Simón departs from her trademark realism to deliver a surreal, druggy reconstruction of her parents’ 1980s lives in Galicia — is cited by every major Cannes review as either the film’s most formally daring achievement or its most overloaded sequence.

• Hélène Louvart’s cinematography operates across three registers: contemporary handheld for the 2004 present, grainy archival quality for the 1980s flashbacks, and DV camcorder footage supposedly recorded by Marina herself — a visual architecture that gives the film both documentary and lyrical registers simultaneously.

• García — discovered on the street, no prior acting experience — carries the film’s entire 114-minute runtime and doubles as both Marina and a version of Marina’s mother in the third-act reconstruction, a performance ICS Film called “one of Simón’s most important moves.”

• The title’s multiple resonances — “romería” means religious pilgrimage in Spanish, also a common Galician festival — is the film’s most formally precise thematic signal: there is no holy destination here, no warm homecoming, only the discovery of where you don’t belong.

• Simón’s triple festival achievement — Berlinale debut, Berlinale Golden Bear, Cannes Main Competition — is one of contemporary European arthouse cinema’s most consistent and most followed directorial trajectories, giving Romería institutional attention independent of its subject matter.

• The press kit’s description of Romería as the final part of the “family cycle” positions the film as both a conclusion and an event — the completion of a project that critics and audiences have followed across three films and eight years.

• ICS Film (Cannes) — Simón’s best film to date; the magical realism sequence makes it so; no false notes, no melodrama; the denouement the only major flaw.

• Variety — lovely, pensive, wistfully moving; based on travels Simón undertook as a teenager; sure to boost her arthouse profile; doesn’t always stand out from the coming-of-age pack; we root for Marina but don’t fully crack into who she is.

• The Film Verdict — drives the story on many different levels; the surreal centrepiece overloads with information better left to the viewer; the press kit confirms this as the final part of the family cycle.

• InSession Film — most personal work; covers a period that still hurts; fragmented remembering as beautiful painting; echoes of Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, Deprisa.

• IMDb user reviews — GerardoMenmar (8): wonderful film about memory and identity, beautiful cinematography, strong score; YoungCriticMovies (8): Simón’s greatest achievement in attention to detail; Garcia’s debut unbelievably accomplished. Metascore 74. IMDb 6.8 from 2,500 viewers.

• Gaudí Awards 2026: Best New Performer — Llúcia Garcia (win). Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Manager (nominations).

• Goya Awards 2026: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Miryam Gallego), Best New Actress (Garcia), Best New Actor (Mitch Martín), Best Costume Design — 5 nominations.

• Feroz Awards 2026: Best Film Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Trailer, Best Poster — 6 nominations.

• Cinema Writers Circle Spain 2026: Best Director, Best New Actor, Best New Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography — 5 nominations.

• Cannes 2025: Palme d’Or nominee. Sydney Film Festival 2025: Sydney Film Prize nominee. Spanish Actors Union 2026: Supporting Female (Gallego), Supporting Male (Ulloa). Sant Jordi: Best Spanish Film nominee. Miami Film Festival 2026: Knight Marimbas Award nominee.

• Spanish theatrical September 5, 2025. Worldwide gross $2,446,776. International sales: MK2 Films.

• Carla Simón — Barcelona 1986; Summer 1993 (Berlinale 2017), Alcarràs (Golden Bear 2022); Premio Nacional de Cinematografía 2023; Creu de Sant Jordi 2025 — closes her family cycle with the most formally experimental entry, switching from handheld naturalism to composed structured shots to reflect Marina’s emotional distance from this unfamiliar family.

• Llúcia García (Marina) — no prior acting experience, discovered on the street during an open casting call — carries the film’s entire runtime in what every reviewer agreed was a debut of extraordinary commitment; won the Gaudí Award for Best New Performer; doubles as both Marina and her mother in the third-act reconstruction.

• Mitch Martín (Suso) — Marina’s amiable cousin who steps in as a stand-in for her father in the surreal reconstruction — provides the film’s most unexpected emotional warmth and earned a Goya Best New Actor nomination.

• Tristán Ulloa (Lois) and Miryam Gallego (Olalla) — the film’s most established presences — earned Goya and Spanish Actors Union supporting nominations for performances that give the family ensemble its dramatic weight.

• Hélène Louvart (cinematographer) — whose work was also present at Cannes 2025 on Eleanor the Great — delivers work cited by critics as the film’s most consistently assured formal element.

The 36 nominations across Spain’s major award circuits confirm the industry’s recognition of the film’s formal ambition and emotional authority. García’s Gaudí win confirms the single most important new discovery the film produces. The Cannes Palme d’Or nomination confirms Simón’s established standing in the international arthouse community. Romería earns its position as the trilogy’s conclusion through the formal courage of its third act and the restraint of every scene that precedes it.

Romería belongs to the European semi-autobiographical memory drama tradition — Summer 1993 and Alcarràs as its own predecessors, Aftersun, La Chimera, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire as its formal conversation partners. Simón’s specific contribution within that tradition is the layered, contested family memory — not one woman’s grief but the collision between multiple conflicting accounts of the same people, forcing the protagonist to construct truth from incomplete and biased testimony. The addition of magical realism to a filmmaker whose entire career has been built on naturalism is the film’s most formally daring departure and its most divisive element.

• The film’s central formal argument — that constructing collective memory is a historical act, requiring the protagonist to assemble competing testimonies into the most coherent available truth — gives Romería its most intellectually ambitious structural dimension.

• The departure into magical realism in the third act is Simón’s most formally significant break with her naturalist methodology — described by ICS Film as the move that makes Romería her best film, and by The Film Verdict as overloading information better left to the viewer.

• The pilgrimage structure — arriving in Galicia as a stranger in your own biological family — gives the film a spiritual and geographic specificity that the Galician landscape amplifies through Louvart’s cinematography.

• The multi-temporal architecture — 2004 present, 1980s flashbacks, DV camcorder footage from Marina’s own recording — gives the film a layered temporal consciousness that its memory subject requires.

• MK2 Films’ international sales gives Romería the arthouse distribution infrastructure that Spanish films with Cannes competition credits require to reach European and North American theatrical audiences.

• Simón’s cumulative festival trajectory — three features across three major festival competition sections — gives the film a pre-established critical community whose engagement precedes the theatrical release.

• The Spain-Germany co-production model and the 3Cat/Ad Vitam production infrastructure give the film institutional support that makes the €3.2 million budget and the European arthouse release circuit viable.

• The heroin and AIDS epidemic of 1980s Spain — which decimated an entire generation and was met with institutional silence and family stigma — is one of Spanish cinema’s most underrepresented historical subjects relative to its generational scale.

• The multi-regional, multi-linguistic Spanish cultural landscape — Galician, Catalan, Castilian Spanish — gives the film a specific national cultural complexity that most Spanish films flatten, and that Romería explicitly addresses through Marina’s outsider status in both Barcelona and Vigo.

• The semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama has established itself as European arthouse cinema’s most commercially consistent genre entry point for the 30–55 audience that constitutes the core theatrical arthouse demographic.

• Simón’s Summer 1993 and Alcarràs audiences give Romería a pre-converted European arthouse following that treats each new Simón film as a cultural event rather than a cinema choice.

• The generational grief and family memory theme — amplified by the critical context of Aftersun, La Chimera, and comparable films — gives the film a specific discovery circuit among younger arthouse viewers who have built emotional vocabulary around this register.

• García’s debut — discovered on the street, winning a Gaudí Award — is the film’s most commercially effective discovery story, giving critics and audiences a specific human narrative around the film’s most exceptional formal element.

The core audience is 28–60 — European arthouse drama audiences who follow Simón’s filmography, Spanish cinema followers who have tracked the trilogy across eight years, and the memory film community for whom Aftersun and La Chimera comparisons function as precise positioning signals. Letterboxd critics placed Romería alongside Aftersun and La Chimera as part of a personal trinity of memory films. The film’s slowness is the consistent critical caveat; its third act and García’s performance are the consistent rewards.

The film’s pace will require patience from viewers expecting conventional narrative momentum. The trilogy’s accumulated emotional weight gives the story a density that rewards familiarity with Simón’s previous work without requiring it. García’s debut is the film’s most reliable discovery asset across critical constituencies.

Simón delivers a film of genuine formal courage — the third-act magical realism sequence is the most significant formal departure of her career, and its divisiveness among critics reflects not failure but the risk that only a filmmaker at the height of her confidence can take. The multi-temporal visual architecture is Louvart’s most complex and most assured work. García’s debut is, by unanimous critical consensus, one of the most remarkable first performances in recent European cinema.

Works best for viewers who respond to naturalistic family drama that earns its emotional weight through accumulation and detail rather than plot mechanics — the Aftersun audience, the Summer 1993 audience, viewers who trust Simón’s formal register to deliver. Less suited for audiences who require conventional pacing or clear emotional signposting.

The film’s most precise thematic statement is that there is no holy destination — no warm homecoming, no restored family, no resolution — only the discovery that Marina’s parents were fully human, fully flawed, and fully worth knowing. Finding where she doesn’t belong gives her, for the first time, a framework for understanding where she does.

The heroin and AIDS epidemic of 1980s Spain — which silenced a generation and stigmatised families who could not acknowledge what their children died of — receives in Romería its most formally rigorous and most emotionally honest cinematic examination. The grandparents who still cannot say the word AIDS in 2004 are the film’s most socially specific and most culturally precise observation.

Marina’s name was erased from her father’s death certificate. Her existence was unacknowledged by paternal grandparents whose shame about AIDS could not accommodate her. The film’s social argument is that family silence is not neutrality but active violence — and that the administrative quest that brings Marina to Vigo is the smallest possible act that opens the largest possible wound.

García’s Marina — reticent, persistent, pent-up, capable of embodying both herself and her mother without warning — is unanimously described as the film’s most exceptional element and one of the most accomplished debut performances in recent European cinema. Louvart’s three-register cinematography — contemporary, archival, camcorder — gives the film its most formally complex visual architecture. Gallego, Ulloa, and Egido give the family ensemble the dramatic weight their competing testimonies require.

Romería will be remembered as the film that completed one of contemporary European cinema’s most coherent directorial autobiographical projects — and as the film that introduced García as a performer of exceptional range and commitment. The third-act magical realism sequence will remain the most debated formal decision in Simón’s career.

• Gaudí Award 2026: Best New Performer (García) — win.

• El Gouna Film Festival: 2 wins (unspecified).

• 36 total nominations: Goya (6), Feroz (6), Gaudí (13), CEC Spain (5), Sydney, Miami, Sant Jordi, Spanish Actors Union (2).

• Cannes 2025 Palme d’Or nominee. Spanish theatrical September 5, 2025. Worldwide gross $2,446,776. Budget €3.2 million.

The Cannes nomination confirmed the film’s international standing. García’s Gaudí win confirmed the most important new performance discovery. The 36 nominations confirmed the Spanish industry’s recognition of the trilogy’s formal completion.

Romería proves that the most honest films about family are the ones that refuse to offer homecoming — and that discovering where you don’t belong is, finally, the only way to understand where you do.

The trilogy that began with Summer 1993 and continued with Alcarràs reaches its conclusion with Simón’s most formally ambitious and most personally exposed entry. García’s debut confirms that the casting decision — a non-actor found on the street — was the film’s most important creative choice. The 36 nominations across Spain’s major award circuits confirm the industry’s recognition of a formally mature and emotionally necessary work.

• Movie themes: The construction of collective memory from competing testimonies, family silence as the perpetuation of stigma, Spain’s AIDS and heroin generation and the shame that outlived them, the pilgrimage structure as search for belonging that ends in understanding rather than arrival, and the question of whether blood makes a family when family has never acknowledged your existence.

• Movie director: Carla Simón — Summer 1993 (Berlinale 2017), Alcarràs (Golden Bear 2022), Premio Nacional de Cinematografía 2023 — closes her family cycle with the most formally experimental entry of her career, departing from naturalism into magical realism at the film’s most critical moment.

• Top casting: García’s debut — discovered on the street, Gaudí Award winner — carries 114 minutes with complete emotional authority and doubles as both Marina and her mother in the surreal reconstruction. Louvart’s three-register cinematography is the film’s most consistently admired formal contribution. Gallego and Ulloa earn supporting recognition for giving the family ensemble its competing-testimony weight.

• Awards and recognition: 2 wins — Gaudí Best New Performer (García), El Gouna (2). 36 nominations: Goya (6), Feroz (6), Gaudí (13), CEC Spain (5), Sydney, Miami, Sant Jordi, Spanish Actors Union (2). Cannes Palme d’Or nominee. Spanish theatrical September 5, 2025. Worldwide gross $2,446,776.

• Why to watch: The formal completion of Simón’s family memory trilogy — featuring García’s exceptional debut, Louvart’s multi-register cinematography, and the most formally daring departure of Simón’s career — set against the Galician coast and the long-suppressed history of 1980s Spain’s AIDS and heroin generation.

• Key success factors: Simón’s cumulative festival authority plus García’s extraordinary debut plus Louvart’s cinematography plus MK2 Films’ international sales infrastructure plus the trilogy’s established European arthouse audience plus the 36-nomination Spanish industry recognition.

• Where to watch: Spanish theatrical from September 5, 2025. International distribution via MK2 Films. Link to watch: https://www.justwatch.com/es/pelicula/romeria (Spain)

Romería completes what Summer 1993 began and Alcarràs confirmed — a coherent, formally evolving, and deeply personal directorial project that has placed Simón among the most important Spanish filmmakers of her generation. García’s debut is the film’s most durable legacy, and the surreal third act is the formal risk that Simón’s career had been building toward. The 36 nominations and the Cannes Palme d’Or competition confirm both the film’s standing and its filmmaker’s fully matured international voice.