This is the story of 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) who is looking for answers.
The year is 2004 and she arrives in Vigo, on the Spanish Atlantic coast.
But before she meets them, she will be greeted by her uncles, aunties and cousins.
Marina doesn’t want to be shielded from the truth. She really wants to understand.
Marina finds that her grandmother isn’t exactly the warmest person in the world and, along with her grandfather, is holding onto a long-buried secret.
Marina, who is keen to document all she is seeing and doing on her video camera (she wants to study cinema), gradually unpeels the layers.
Naturalistic in style, with plenty of handheld camera usage, it is a slow burn film that unfolds over five days.
Marina’s parents’ tale starts out as a love story, but descends into darkness and shame.
Simón’s biological mother Neus Pipó Simón is also given a writing credit because material in the movie is drawn from letters that Neus Pipó wrote.
Carla lost her parents when she was young (she was only six when her mother died) and then went to live with her aunt and uncle.
As Simón puts it, young people broke with the inherited values of a deeply Catholic and conservative society.
Simón tried to reconstruct her parents’ story, but failed. Out of that though emerged ROMERÍA.
It is not a film for everyone, especially those who don’t have the patience to wade through elongated periods of family interactions.
A lot of that has to do with the strong showing of Llúcia Garcia in the lead.
The film also features attractive cinematography of Galicia’s rugged coast by Hélène Louvart.
