Spanish director Carla Simón has infused her films with many of her own, often harrowing, yet almost sublime experiences of broken families. Her debut feature, Summer 1993, tells the story of a six-year-old girl sent to live with her aunt and uncle; her next film, Alcarrás, follows a rural farming family in Catalonia; and now, Romería, tells the story of an aspiring teenage filmmaker who films a father she never knew and a mother she, in a sense, knew, who died of AIDS. Her latest film, a memoir, is a creative reimagining of how her parents fell in love, became addicted to drugs, and how Simón tried to capture it as a teenager.
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Simón, like an emotional anthropologist, revisits her past, using some abstractions but often introducing characters who are actually her alter egos: take, for example, 18-year-old Marina, played by aspiring actress Llúcia García, who comes to the seaside town of Vigo on Galicia's Atlantic coast to learn more about her father and mother, in a film set in 2004. In other words, at that time, Simón, the adopted daughter of her aunt and uncle, was learning the same things about her parents—including her mother, who only learned of her HIV status at Simón's birth and died when the director was six.
«"I have three very large families: my adoptive family and my biological family, so I feel like I've explored them all," Simone told IndieWire when asked if her upcoming fourth feature film would also be autobiographical. No, actually, because she's writing a musical.
«"The premiere of 'Romería' coincided with the birth of my second child, so now I feel like it's time to look to the future. Cinema allows you to explore worlds and universes you wouldn't otherwise know, doesn't it? So right now, I don't need to focus on my personal life anymore. Perhaps I'll return to it. After all, everything is very personal," said Simón, who lives in the seaside town of El Mansú near Barcelona.
Simone's new film—introspective, often visually breathtaking, shot by cinematographer Hélène Louvart against the backdrop of the sparkling coastline—premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, screened at numerous festivals, and is just now being released in the US by Janus Films. "It doesn't stop me from working on new projects," she said of the film's touring and promotional activities. "It allowed me to complete something connected to my family, my past, my memories.".
In Romería, Marina travels to Galicia to convince her late paternal grandparents, whom she never met, to support her application for a scholarship to study film. Her father's family is struck by her resemblance to her late mother, whose diaries become the thread that not only leads Marina to her family pilgrimage but also forms the basis of a behind-the-scenes narrative set in the 1980s, situating the film in 2004. Armed with a digital video camera and only fragmented memories, Marina sets out to explore a family she never knew.
«"Choosing the actress for this role was very difficult because she had to play two roles simultaneously: Marina and her mother," Simon said of casting her alter ego. Indeed, in the film's most captivating scene, Marina takes on the role of her mother—meaning Garcia plays a dual role, also playing Simon's mother—during an ecstatic, even romantic, but ultimately torturous drug binge.
«There were girls who were a great fit for Marina, who were a great fit for my mother, but they were both challenging. At some point, we knew exactly who we were looking for,» Simón said. «We had a team, two girls, who were walking the streets, trying to find exactly that kind of teenager. We found her in Gràcia [a neighborhood in Barcelona]; it’s a very lively place, full of young people. She was just coming back from a Boy Scout meeting, and they stopped her and asked, «Do you want to go to the casting?» At first, she didn’t really trust them, but she ended up coming with friends, who thought we were going to kidnap her or something [laughs]. I somehow saw in her the teenager I was. She was very innocent, but at the same time very curious about the world.».
Llucia García didn't take acting lessons to prepare for her first role—her Marina is a bit enigmatic, a bit hard to read, a mysterious young woman with a face sometimes half-obscured by the camera, restlessly curious. But Simone led three months of rehearsals with most of the cast before filming began, all of which the director filmed with her Handicam video camera.
«One of the first things I gave her was my mother’s letters. I had a stack of letters she wrote to her friends and family,» she said. “We turned them into a diary for the film. I just wanted her to experience… my story, and the story of this generation. I also asked her to watch some drug films. At first, I thought, maybe you should watch them with your parents because she was still too young. She ended up watching them alone.”.
Indeed, Simón captures the madness, intoxication, and despair of heroin addiction in mid-1980s Spain, when Simón's parents were at the peak of their addiction; in the film, Marina's paternal grandparents refuse to acknowledge the death of her father, Alfonso, due to the widespread stigma associated with the disease and homophobia.
Among the films Simón assigned García to watch to prepare him for the role of Marina's drug-addicted mother in the flashback scenes were the 1979 Spanish arthouse horror film about drug addiction, Arrebato; Jerry Schatzberg's sad New York story, The Panic in Needle Park, starring a frequently sleepy Al Pacino; and Uli Edel's harrowing 1981 German film in the style of Go Ask Alice, Christian F.
«"There's also Barbet Schroeder's 'More,' which is perfect because it's set in Ibiza and also tells the love story of this couple. Their drug use is old-fashioned, because it was 1969," said Simone. The screenwriter and director recalls the first day she asked her actors to perform the film's key scene, in which Marina's parents indulge in hedonism at the Fiestas de Vigo festival and use drugs, during rehearsal.
«"We were in this room where I'm now, and I gave them a spoon and everything I had so they could pretend, we turned on some music, and they got into the right mood. We ended up tripping, even though we weren't taking anything," she said. "Of course, we had a guy who lived in the '80s, who used heroin, come in and give them, me, some advice during filming, during rehearsals.".
Simone said that through this emotional autobiography - possibly the last of her screen career - "Romeria" helped her get closer and heal some of the emotional wounds in her relationship with her father's family.
«"One of my uncles, the one I'm closest to, read the script. He came to the set and ended up playing the lawyer," she said. "My grandparents died a long time ago, so obviously they don't know anything about the film, but my other uncles, they live in Galicia… they all understood my desire to make this film, although it certainly stirred up memories for them too. They all reacted differently to the film, but not in a way that made them angry at me. They're all fine. For some, it was a kind of healing. For some, it was a little painful, but yes, they're all fine.".
Romeria, a Janus Films production, opens in select theaters Friday, June 26.