At the 23rd edition of Alice nella Città, Carla Simón, the acclaimed Catalan filmmaker behind “Summer 1993” and “Alcarràs“, talks about her new film “Romería”.

A delicate and deeply personal work, “Romería” closes a trilogy in which Carla Simón has explored family, loss, and identity through the lens of memory and imagination.

A Trilogy Comes Full Circle

“When I started with my first film, Summer 1993, I didn’t know I would make two more films about my family,” Carla Simón explains. “But it just happened. I have a very big family full of stories.”

With “Romería”, the director completes a cycle that began with childhood and ends with motherhood, marking a turning point in her creative and personal journey. “After Romería, I feel that I already talked about all of them somehow,” she reflects. “Now my perspective has changed — I’m part of the middle generation.”

In “Romería,” Marina travels to Spain’s coast to meet her late father’s family, as Carla Simón turns loss into a journey of memory and love.

Cinema as a Tool for Memory and Healing

One of the most striking aspects of “Romería” is its exploration of cinema as a way to create memories that never existed. As Simón says, “I realized that I have cinema to create these images that I was lacking. If you’re conscious that you are imagining it, you know that you can get close to reality, but it will never be reality.”

In this sense, “Romería” becomes both a reconstruction and a reinvention, a poetic act of healing through storytelling. Simón’s own loss inspires the film — both her parents died of AIDS when she was a child — and her effort to reconnect with her father’s family years later.

Her words are as moving as they are lucid: “If my parents were alive and they told me their love story, maybe it would not be exactly as they tell it anyway. So I thought, why not imagine it?”

From Realism to Poetic Imagination

After the observational realism of “Summer 1993” and “Alcarràs“, “Romería” introduces a dreamlike, lyrical dimension. “I wanted to have more poetry,” Simón admits. “Cinema can be many other things, and here came the idea of having this part more imagined or more dreamy.”

This shift is reflected in the film’s rhythm and visual tone, which move fluidly between memory, imagination, and gesture. A key sequence, featuring a musical interlude, evokes the collective energy of Spain’s 1980s youth. “I thought it was a nice way to tell that this happened to many other people,” she says, noting that the chosen song is from Vigo, her father’s hometown.

The Weight of Gestures and the Language of Family

For Simón, family is made of gestures as much as words. “There are many things in family relationships that are not said, that are more through gestures,” she explains. In “Romería” , Marina’s actions — handling the ropes of a boat as her father once did — become a form of inheritance, a physical echo of belonging.
“I relate the sea to my parents,” she says. “My father used to sail, and my mother talked about the sea in her letters. It represents the freedom they felt in that time.”

A Cinema of Truth and Tenderness

Known for her work with non-professional actors, Carla Simón continues her commitment to authenticity. “If you are portraying a family, you need to create intimacy between the actors,” she says. Through rehearsals and improvisations, she helps them “create a shared memory,” allowing emotions to feel real on screen.

Asked what memory she feels she’s finally created through “Romería”, Simón smiles: “It gave me the chance to create a lot of images from my parents’ story. But the most important one was their love.”

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