"“You don't remember what really happened. You remember the last time you remember what happened.” Three films into her career, the 39-year-old director is already closely associated with childhood recollections. Her 2017 debut, Summer 1993, was a semi-autobiographical coming-of-ager about a six-year-old girl who, like Simón, loses both her parents to Aids. After winning a Golden Bear in Berlin for 2022's Alcarràs, itself inspired by her youth growing up on a peach farm, Simón has delivered a semi-follow up to Summer 1993 with Romería, a 2004-set drama about an 18-year-old girl whose parents also died of Aids."
"“I was frustrated that I couldn't reconstruct memories about my parents,” says Simón. “This film made me realise I could make it up. Cinema gives you that opportunity. These are now my memories.” Simón was three when her father died, and six when her mother passed from the same illness. After her mother's funeral, Simón lost contact with her paternal family. Named after the Spanish word for “pilgrimage”, Romería is loosely based on trips Simón herself made at 18 (to Madrid) and 29 (to Galicia) to reunite with biological relatives on her father's side."
"In the film's telling, Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is an inquisitive teen who wishes to study filmmaking in Barcelona. To do so, she requires her parents' death certificates, which results in her visiting relatives she can barely remember if she's met them at all. In Vigo, Marina is greeted with pleasantries by some, but an overt lack of warmth from others; the younger cousins have been instructed not to swim in the same water as someone whose parents died of Aids."
Memory is described as unreliable, because people do not recall what truly happened but instead recall the last time they remembered. A filmmaker known for childhood-based stories created films rooted in personal loss, including a coming-of-age set in 1993 and a later drama set in 2004. The later film follows an 18-year-old who seeks her parents’ death certificates to pursue filmmaking studies, leading her to relatives she barely remembers. The journey includes mixed welcome, social boundaries, and fear-driven instructions tied to parents’ deaths from AIDS. The screenplay is largely fictional while drawing on discovered letters written by her mother to friends.
#memory-and-recollection #semi-autobiographical-cinema #aids-related-family-loss #coming-of-age-drama #spanish-pilgrimage-and-reunions
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