Carla Simón delivers with “Romería” a film that inhabits the threshold between autobiography and family myth — a delicate portrait of what remains unsaid. The director returns to her most personal themes — loss, identity, the voids left by absent parents — and proposes a narrative that is as much a search as it is an invention.

The protagonist is Marina, an 18-year-old orphan since early childhood, who travels to Vigo in 2004 to obtain a document required to apply for a university scholarship. There, she meets for the first time the paternal family she had never known and confronts the silences, the guilt, and the contradictions of the past — from heroin addiction to social shame, from the stigma of AIDS to the memories that are either lost or retold in different ways.

Stylistically, “Romería” preserves Simón’s attentive, observational gaze, but with a renewed boldness. It is not pure realism: flashbacks, home videos, her mother’s diary, and even moments of poetic fantasy appear, breaking linear time. The film also adopts an episodic structure enriched by these fragments — fragments of memories, of missing images, of unresolved feelings.

If there is a fragility in the film, it lies less in its ambitions than in the dilemma it poses: that of reconstructing the past with tools that are necessarily imperfect — fragmented memories, contradictory versions, idealized desires. Simón embraces this fragility and transforms it into narrative strength. Romería does not force reconciliation, nor does it aim to purge guilt; instead, it offers the viewer space to feel the discomfort, tenderness, and complexity of belonging to a story that was never linear.

Overall, “Romería” emerges as the highest point so far in Carla Simón’s body of work — a meditation on how silence shapes families, on how we reconstruct ourselves through absences, and on the courage required to face what we have left behind and what we choose to remember.