A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Romería (Carla Simón, 2025)

Llúcia Garcia in Romería

Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Martín, Tristán Ulloa, Celine Tyll, León Romagosa, Hans Romagosa, Marina Troncoso, José Ángel Egido, Miryam Gallego, Sara Casonovas. Screenplay: Carla Simón. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Art direction: Mónica Bernuy. Film editing: Sergio Jiménez, Ana Pfaff. Music: Ernest Pipó. 

Who are you if you don't know where you came from? That's the question that haunts Marina (Llúcia Garcia) in two ways: technically, because she needs documentation that establishes her parentage, and emotionally, because both of her parents are now dead and what little she knows about her father came from her mother, who raised her. She needs her grandparents, whom she has never known, to certify that he was her father, a fact that she discovers went unrecorded on his death certificate. So she visits his birthplace in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain, and is plunged into a vibrant, fractious family with some secrets they'd rather remain unknown. In Romería, Carla Simón follows Marina's pilgrimage into the past, first as a kind of detective story and then, with a beautifully accomplished segue, as she imagines the life of her mother and father before she was born. It's not a sentimental film, however. Marina's story is haunted by family pride and greed, by drug trafficking, drug use, and AIDS. Simón defily handles these sometimes conflicting elements, skillfully avoiding melodrama.  

Posted by
Links: , ,