“The naturalism as a result of her formal choices keeps the film small, going for minimalism rather than grand gestures, but when Simón does take a swing she knocks it out of the park.”

There is a segue between two time periods in Carla Simón’s third feature Romería that makes you remember how invigorating cinema can be. A moment of magical realism is a flight of fancy we are not used to from the Spanish filmmaker, but it feels entirely in place in this sorrowful trip down a fragmented and hidden memory lane. ‘Romería’ stands for pilgrimage, and the protagonist’s short trip across the bay in a rowboat feels exactly like that, as did her whole trip across the country to the Galician coast. Santiago de Compostela is less than an hour’s drive away too, the place of death of her father. Memories are not always happy in Romería, but they provide closure and a way to move forward, a sense of belonging and knowing where you don’t belong. In Simón’s tactile cinema, and with a hefty autobiographical dose, emotions are again layered and often riddled with secrets, but it is Simón’s one move away from realism that turns Romería into her best film to date.

In July 2004 Marina (Llúcia Garcia) travels from Barcelona to the Galician seaside town of Vigo. She wants to study cinema, but for a scholarship she needs an official statement from her grandparents acknowledging her bloodline. Her parents can’t provide this, as they both died of AIDS during the ’90s, leaving Marina to be raised by adoptive parents. The death of her parents is a delicate subject in the family on her father’s side. While she is seemingly welcomed with open arms by aunts and uncles and a whole string of cousins of all ages, only her uncle Iago (Alberto Gracia) is open about her father’s heroin addiction that eventually did him in. Iago hasn’t tried to bury the past, and for that is regarded as the black sheep of the family, certainly by Marina’s grandparents. When she finally meets them, at a large family gathering, a cold shoulder awaits her. Her grandmother (Marina Troncoso) bristles at any mention that Marina looks like her mother (more on that later), and her grandfather (José Ángel Egido) thinks that giving Marina a large sum of cash, ostensibly for her university tuition, will make the problem go away. There is a sense of attraction between her and her oldest cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín), who takes her to a local fiesta, where she runs into not only Iago, but also a mysterious cat that she previously met on her late father’s boat.

It is here that the time shift comes, as we brilliantly transition to the ’90s and a young couple in love: Marina’s parents, played by Garcia and Martín. We see them sailing on his boat, not the first time Simón signals the affluence of Marina’s parental family, and frolicking on the beach. A young couple in love, but as Marina’s mother’s diary attests, verbalized in voice over to frame segments of the film, this young love will go down as the drug use goes up. It is the middle of the AIDS crisis, and heroin addicts are dying like flies, sometimes to the shame of their family, like Marina’s. “Everybody died behind closed doors,” says one of her uncles, but not in these magical realist flashbacks, where another uncharacteristic moment, a choreographed dance routine set to ’90s Spanish punk, movingly symbolizes the many lives this crisis took.

After these beautiful moments of lyricism, the denouement comes as a bit of a letdown, bringing closure to Marina’s story in a too matter-of-fact manner. It is the only major flaw in Romería, which otherwise perfectly balances the grounded realism of the early aughts sequences with the more imaginative, voice over driven memories of the ’90s. DP Hélène Louvart is clearly up for the task of making both time periods distinctive, also using camcorder footage ostensibly taken by budding cinephile Marina to document her journey, to link some of the moments in both timelines together. The grainy and harsh quality of the tapes gets a sensual cousin when we switch to the idyllic period of Marina’s parents’ all-consuming love, at one point beautifully captured on a bed of seaweed. Later it becomes grimy and grim as the descent into the underworld begins.

With this return to the death of her parents after her debut Summer 1993, Simón shows that she is not afraid to mine the cracks of her own history to tell a more universal story for those that either lived through those times or, like Marina, try to find clarity in the period’s darkness. Art is a way to work through your problems, and Simón’s strong personal connection to the material creates a great sense of honesty. There are no false notes here, no melodramatic angling for emotion. Romería is at times raw and does not shy away from the cruelty people can inflict on each other, even if they are close. As in her previous work, the naturalism as a result of her formal choices keeps the film small, going for minimalism rather than grand gestures, but when Simón does take a swing she knocks it out of the park.