Carla Simón Turned Her Family’s Deepest Tragedy Into Her Most Personal Film Yet
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Romería" opens in select US theaters from Janus Films on Friday, June 26, following its premiere at Cannes 2025 in competition and a run at 'myriad festivals'
- Llúcia Garcia, a newcomer street-cast in Barcelona's Gràcia neighborhood while returning from a Boy Scouts meeting, plays 18-year-old Marina — and in flashback, Simón's late heroin-addicted mother — investigating family secrets in 2004-set Galicia
- Carla Simón told IndieWire 'Romería' may be her last autobiographical film; her next project is a musical, and the film premiered the same week she gave birth to her second child
- Simón assigned Garcia a viewing list — Iván Zulueta's 'Arrebato' (1979), 'The Panic in Needle Park,' Uli Edel's 'Christiane F.' (1981), and Barbet Schroeder's 'More' — to prepare for the film's heroin-bender sequences
- Simón's uncle, one of the family members she is closest with, read the script, attended the shoot, and ended up playing the lawyer; other Galician relatives 'understood my need to make the film, even though it obviously opened their memory as well'
- Hélène Louvart lensed the film, which Simón described as 'introspective, often visually breath-stopping'; Simón filmed three months of rehearsals herself on a Handicam
Why it matters: With Janus Films opening 'Romería' in US theaters June 26 after its Cannes 2025 competition bow, Simón closes what she calls her autobiographical cycle — her fourth feature will be a musical, not another memoir. Her father's Galician family, several of whom acted in and attended the shoot, accepted the project as 'healing' rather than resenting it, marking an unusually intimate collaboration between filmmaker and surviving relatives.
Ask SkimNews
