Carla Simón’s third feature, completes an informal family trilogy initiated with Summer 1993 and Alcarràs. Set in 2004, it follows Marina, an eighteen-year-old orphan whose parents died of AIDS during her childhood, and who was raised by relatives. On reaching legal adulthood, she journeys from Barcelona to Vigo, her father’s Galician hometown, to claim recognition of her biological lineage through her grandparents and to piece together the fragmented history of her parents. The journey unfolds through encounters with extended family members, diaries, silences, and partial revelations. What emerges is both a cartography of Galicia’s coastlines and interiors, and an inner archaeology of memory: Marina’s quest becomes a confrontation with absence, shame, and intergenerational silence, where the desire for truth is continually refracted by the fear of rejection.Romería situates itself at the intersection of autobiographical impulse and fictional construction, echoing theoretical debates in memory and trauma studies on how the past can be narrated when direct testimony is absent. Simón employs Marina’s perspective not as confessional mode but as hermeneutic device, structuring the narrative through fragments, omissions, and deferred revelations. Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, privileging natural light and textured surfaces, inscribes the landscape as an active archive, recalling both ethnographic cinema and the sensorial realism of European auteurs. The editing (Sergio Jiménez, Ana Pfaff) functions as a montage of discontinuity, aligning with what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory”: the transmission of experiences not lived but inherited. Compared to Simón’s earlier work, Romería radicalizes duration and silence, transforming domestic gestures and maritime horizons into sites of temporal layering. The film thus resists closure, staging instead the indeterminacy of memory as both burden and possibility. In this sense, Romería affirms Simón’s position within a lineage of European cinema that interrogates family, history, and loss not through narrative resolution, but through formal strategies that demand active interpretation.Teresa Cavina