Romería · reception & legacy

2025 · Carla Simón

How Romería has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Landed in Cannes Competition 2025 carrying Golden Bear expectations after Alcarràs — and left prize-less, with critics split between 'her most ambitious film yet' and 'her most uneven'. A year on, it reads less like a stumble and more like Simón deliberately loosening her own formula.

What's debated

The recurring fight: is the bold, dreamlike swerve in its second half a leap forward for Simón or a betrayal of the naturalism that made Summer 1993 and Alcarràs sing — a debate rerun when Spain passed it over for Sirât as its Oscar submission.

Where it stands

Instantly filed by cinephiles as the capstone of Simón's autofiction trilogy — the 'you can't discuss Summer 1993 and Alcarràs without it' third panel.

★ Did you know? The pilgrimage is real: Simón, whose parents both died of AIDS when she was small, actually made this trip to Vigo to meet her father's Galician family, and cast first-time actor Llúcia Garcia to retrace it.

Named by the director

Influences Carla Simón has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Summer with Monika (1953) — Simón cited Bergman's runaway-lovers idyll as a touchstone for the film's imagined, free-spirited passages.
Zabriskie Point (1970) — She pointed to Antonioni's desert sequence as inspiration for the film's most unmoored, dreamlike stretch.
More (1969) — Schroeder's young hippies adrift in Ibiza fed her vision of her parents' 1980s counterculture generation.