Romería - Expat Cinema Rotterdam
Marina lost her parents at a young age to addiction and illness. When, as an aspiring filmmaker, she sets out one summer to her roots in Spain’s northwestern coastal region, she finds herself entangled in a web of conflicting memories and heartbreaking discoveries. Award-winning Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón drew on her own experiences for this wistful, sun-drenched portrait.
Does a shared bloodline automatically make you family? Marina was orphaned early in life. At 18, armed with a camcorder, she travels to sunny Vigo, a city on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where she will finally meet her father’s family—whose signature she needs for a scholarship application.
There, she encounters a whole host of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. The family is warm and welcoming, yet also irritable and evasive, affluent yet distant. As Marina pieces together fragments of the past and tries to form a picture of her parents, she is confronted with conflicting recollections and painful new truths.
In 2022, Carla Simón won the Golden Bear in Berlin for Alcarràs. With Romería (“Pilgrimage”), she shares an intimate piece of autobiographical fiction that poignantly reveals how we can never fully know our parents. Both Llúcia Garcia and the breathtaking Galician coastline deliver remarkable performances in this film, which shows how filmmaking—and storytelling in general—can be a deeply immersive way of processing an elusive past.
- 19:00
Kies tijdstip
- filmspecial
Marina lost her parents at a young age to addiction and illness. When, as an aspiring filmmaker, she sets out one summer to her roots in Spain’s northwestern coastal region, she finds herself entangled in a web of conflicting memories and heartbreaking discoveries. Award-winning Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón drew on her own experiences for this wistful, sun-drenched portrait.
Does a shared bloodline automatically make you family? Marina was orphaned early in life. At 18, armed with a camcorder, she travels to sunny Vigo, a city on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where she will finally meet her father’s family—whose signature she needs for a scholarship application.
There, she encounters a whole host of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. The family is warm and welcoming, yet also irritable and evasive, affluent yet distant. As Marina pieces together fragments of the past and tries to form a picture of her parents, she is confronted with conflicting recollections and painful new truths.
In 2022, Carla Simón won the Golden Bear in Berlin for Alcarràs. With Romería (“Pilgrimage”), she shares an intimate piece of autobiographical fiction that poignantly reveals how we can never fully know our parents. Both Llúcia Garcia and the breathtaking Galician coastline deliver remarkable performances in this film, which shows how filmmaking—and storytelling in general—can be a deeply immersive way of processing an elusive past.
