“Romería” within the cinema: The dance of the generations | EUROtoday

It begins on the water. The photographs from an previous digital digital camera shake to the rhythm of the waves. A crusing boat on the horizon, mountains move by, the solar breaks by way of the clouds. A lady reads a diary entry written in September 1987. She and “Fon,” she says, have discovered a pleasant residence. The digital camera exhibits a high-rise constructing that’s repeatedly burned into the photographs all through the movie. The view is gorgeous, says the girl, and in addition the view of the ocean. “Sometimes it is calm, blue and peaceful, sometimes wild and restless, but always it is the sea.”

The 35mm photographs with which “Romería” begins and that are repeatedly edited all through the movie had been taken by the Catalan director Carla Simón herself in 2004; the voiceover recites passages from her mom’s diary. Simón’s movie is what the title guarantees in its translated which means: a celebration, right here one in every of impressions and recollections. And a pilgrimage into your personal previous.

In her third function movie, which is once more autobiographically coloured, the director follows a movie model of herself as she searches for her personal origins. Marina, performed with reserve and curiosity by Llúcia Garcia in her first movie position ever, travels to Vigo on the Spanish Atlantic coast in 2004, geared up with a digital camera. Her father Alfonso’s household, or Fon for brief, lives there, whom she has by no means met. The 18-year-old was raised by a foster mom after her mother and father died and desires a certificates of parentage with the intention to apply for a scholarship to review movie. But there isn’t any hint of her in her father’s loss of life certificates. A bureaucratic error?

Reality and creativeness interpenetrate in “Romería” and create a cinematographic actuality within the clean areas of Carla Simón’s personal story. Simón is the nice household chronicler of European cinema, whose movie work is impressed by her personal biography. Born in Barcelona in 1986, she grew up in a small mountain village in Catalonia together with her uncle and aunt after her mother and father died of AIDS – from town to the countryside in a big household that ran a peach orchard.

Her shimmering debut “Frida’s Summer” additionally started together with her loss of life. The movie delves into the angle of a bit of woman who strikes to the nation to reside together with her uncle’s household after her mom dies. In “Alcarràs – The Last Harvest,” with which Simón gained the Golden Bear on the Berlinale in 2022, she portrayed a big household on a peach plantation and advised of the painful farewell to household traditions. “Romería,” which premiered on the Cannes Film Festival, is the third a part of her narrative cycle, her private and surprisingly common filmic therapy.

The movie is reminiscence and affiliation on the similar time. He follows the occasions by way of the eyes of the silent heroine and, like her, you might be initially overwhelmed by the goings-on of the big household and the unknown individuals. She is touring on a crusing yacht with Uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), his spouse and their youngsters, together with cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín), with whom she has a direct bond. The crew bathes and barbecues collectively, typically in view of the high-rise the place Lois claims Marina’s mother and father by no means lived.

Her different uncle Iago (Alberto Gracia), alternatively, claims the other, that her mother and father did reside there. And he tells her about his father’s ardour for crusing, who sailed till he died and thought that AIDS was an invention. Between Iago, the aunts, one in every of whom offers her an exquisite pink costume, different cousins ​​and the eccentric grandparents who reside in a villa, Marina searches for the reality. She learns that Fon didn’t die the 12 months she was born, however 5 years later in 1992. So why did not her father ever go to her in Barcelona?

Captured within the sensual photographs of the French camerawoman Hélène Louvart, “Romería” exhibits an nearly detective-like seek for clues inside the household. Marina observes, weighs up, listens rigorously to who’s telling which story about her mother and father and tries to reconcile them. She movies her mother and father’ historic locations together with her digital camera and is accompanied all through her journey by her mom’s diary entries.

“Romería” doesn’t simply comply with its protagonist. Rather, the movie develops right into a kaleidoscope wherein mother and father and daughters, sure: totally different generations, contact, mirror and penetrate one another. In a dreamlike reenactment, this truly occurs fairly actually. This creates a dialogue between previous and current.

With advanced hints, “Romería” additionally tells of life within the post-Franco period, of progressive existence and the results of the heroin disaster and the AIDS epidemic in Spain. The second when Marina and Nuno land at a folks competition and a conventional drum dance results in a dance efficiency wherein persons are regularly coated with shiny cloths turns into a formidable metaphor. You can hear the track “Bailaré sobre tu tumba” (“I will dance on your grave”) by the Spanish punk band Siniestro Total.

Parallel to “Romería”, Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” is one other movie which, albeit in an apparent abstraction, brings the AIDS epidemic and its inter-familial penalties to the display. Cinema finds new approaches to ongoing social trauma. Sometimes it’s calm and peaceable, generally wild and stressed, however at all times it’s life.