Romería · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Marina arrives in Vigo to collect a signature. That's the whole errand: an eighteen-year-old needs her grandparents' names on a form so a film school will pay her way. What she gets instead is a house full of people who have agreed, without ever saying so, not to talk about how her parents died. Start there, with the girl at the door holding a diary that isn't hers, and Romería opens like a lockbox.

Carla Simón builds the film around a girl who mostly watches. Marina is what Deleuze calls a seer — a voyant. In the older cinema, the cinema of action, a character perceives a situation and acts on it to change it; perception feeds straight into movement, and the plot is the record of that circuit closing. Marina cannot close it. She has nothing to do against a family organized around silence except look, listen, and endure the meals and the sea and the evasions. Deleuze's name for what fills the screen when action drains out of it is the pure optical and sound situation — the opsign. Louvart's camera gives us Marina's Galicia as exactly that: sunburned skin, the chop and glint of the Atlantic, seawater's texture, a coast that isn't a backdrop for events but a register of feeling. The ocean's turbulence is Marina's interior because the interior has nowhere else to surface. This is why the film can feel diffuse and still feel exact. Nothing is being solved; something is being seen.

The deepest device is a split between what we hear and what we see. Simón threads the 2004 present with voiceover taken from the dead mother's diaries and letters, conjuring an early-1980s world the camera can never reach — the heroin years, the AIDS deaths, a whole lost generation. Deleuze would call this an audiovisual disjunction: the voice and the image stop telling one story and start telling two. The image shows a bright coast in 2004; the voice speaks from a grave. Neither can be folded back into the other. And because that voice testifies to a past the landscape no longer visibly holds, the coast becomes what Deleuze, following Straub and Huillet, called a stratigraphic image — an emptied place spoken over by an absent history, the ground reading like an archaeological layer. The Atlantic that was an epicentre of the epidemic looks, in 2004, like nothing at all. The film makes you feel the nothing as a burial.

The mother's words are not dialogue. They're closer to what Deleuze names a speech-act of legending — a testimonial voice that doesn't converse but bears witness, calling a vanished people back into a kind of provisional existence. This matters because the people the film mourns are, in the strict sense, missing: not just dead but unspoken, written out of the family's own account of itself. Deleuze's phrase for modern political cinema — 'the people are missing' — usually names something grander, but Simón finds it in one household. The buried generation has no one to speak it except a diary and a granddaughter who never met them.

Then the film breaks its own contract. Late on, a sustained sequence plays as event and is retroactively revealed to be fantasy — Marina imagining, not witnessing. Deleuze calls this the power of the false, and he means it as praise. Autofiction is built on it. Simón has been explicit that she invented what the story needed where memory and record fell silent, and the film stages that honesty as form: it shows you a scene composed as truth, then withdraws its object, so the image is left describing something that never happened yet tells you what the past felt like. This is crystalline description — an image that replaces its own referent. The reveal reorganizes everything before it. You can no longer trust the boundary between what Marina found and what Marina made, which is precisely the boundary autofiction exists to dissolve. Marina, the aspiring filmmaker assembling her own origins, is the forger in Deleuze's sense — not a liar but a maker of truth, caught in the act of legending herself into being.

Place this in a lineage and the craft debts are specific. Simón's own Summer 1993 set the template: the opaque child-lead cast through a long search, real family locations, grief kept just off-screen. Alcarràs handed forward Hélène Louvart's handheld, dust-and-skin naturalism and the trick of choreographing a whole clan as one breathing organism with overlapping, unprivileged talk — which is why Marina reads as an outsider inside the frame. The late turn to fable has a direct precedent in Louvart's work on Happy as Lazzaro, where grounded realism snaps into myth midstream; La Chimera and The Lost Daughter are siblings in the same Louvart grammar of coastal ambience, buried pasts made tangible, and a woman whose interiority the camera holds at arm's length.

What did Romería do? It took the family autofiction — a mode that risks sentiment — and gave it a rigorous doubt about its own materials. It says: I cannot show you my parents, so I will show you the coast where they vanished, read to you from a voice that outlived them, and then confess the one scene I most wanted was invented. That confession is the film's ethics. Watch it again and notice how much you were trusting the image before it told you not to. The pilgrimage of the title was never about the signature. It was about learning to see a past you can only forge.