Romería (CTC)

The beautiful new drama from Berlin Golden Bear-winning 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 for the first time, discovering her late parents’ complex and secret history.

2004. Vigo, Spain's Atlantic coast. 18-year-old Marina 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, and is immediately confronted with a past shaped by absence and long-buried emotions, hindering her ambition to reconstruct a coherent account of her father, the love story he had with her mother, and her place in the story.

Featuring a luminous central performance from Garcia and stunning cinematography of Galicia’s rugged coast by Hélène Louvart, Romería - meaning “pilgrimage” - is an intimate, sensual journey into how the past endures through the stories we inherit, shaping who we become.

Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Robles, Tristán Ulloa, Janet Novás, Celine Tyll, Miryam Gallego, Janet Novás, Sara Casasnovas, José Ángel Egido

Director: Carla Simón

★★★★★ "Dazzling. A roméria can mean a fiesta or a pilgrimage and this joyous and melancholic journey partakes of both" FINANCIAL TIMES

★★★★ "Gripping. Rich, warm and candid." GUARDIAN

★★★★½ "Brilliant. Makes you remember how invigorating cinema can be" CINEPHILE SOCIETY

★★★★ "Emotional, politically timely and euphorically moving. A dazzling and magical film, silent and yet deafening, which moves across the screen like a memory of our own" EL MUNDO