Romería

Carla Simón won the Golden Bear with Alcarràs in 2022 and reached the Cannes competition with her third feature in 2025. Like Summer 1993 it draws directly on her own history: both her parents died of AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s, and Romería follows a young woman meeting the paternal family she has never known.

Llúcia Garcia plays Marina, eighteen, arriving in Vigo with a bureaucratic errand — a grant application needs the family's signatures — and a diary belonging to her mother. The relatives are hospitable and practised at steering conversation; the Galician middle class of the 1980s does not discuss heroin, and the film is about what that silence has cost three decades later. Simón moves between the present, imagined reconstructions and Super 8 without announcing the transitions.

Spain submitted it for the Academy Awards. It is gentler than Alcarràs and more formally adventurous, and it completes what Simón has described as a trilogy about her own family — one of the most quietly remarkable projects in current European cinema.