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In her Golden Bear-winning Alcarr\u00e1s<\/em>, Carla Sim\u00f3n meets a family standing on the brink of a monumental life change, chronicling the minutia of their lives as it begins to morph into something foreign. In Romer\u00eda, this change lies in the past, where it remained flimsily buried until the curious hands of young Marina (Ll\u00facia Garcia) came to pluck it back to the surface.<\/p>\n The girl, raised by her mother\u2019s family after becoming orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rectify her birth certificate to include her biological father so she can qualify for a scholarship. This bureaucratic chore sees her travel alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nested in the northwestern coast, where she is suddenly not only no longer alone but surrounded by dozens of family members she either has not met or has very little recollection of.<\/p>\n Romer\u00eda<\/em> stands for pilgrimage in Spanish, and the film is as much of a literal pilgrimage in Marina\u2019s long overdue homecoming as it is for Simon herself. The semiautobiographical drama is set in 2004, and sees Marina try to make sense of this new expansive world suddenly engulfing her through the low-quality lens of a digital camera. The director zooms into crooked wooden alabasters and delicately swinging wind chimes, grasping at texture and sound with the voracity of those who understand the stakes of faded memories.<\/p>\n Like in her two previous features, Simon is most interested in capturing the intricate fabric of familial relationships molded by the intimacy of time and suddenly reworked by life\u2019s tricky, unpredictable hands. Similarly to six-year-old Frida in Summer of 1993, Marina has to make sense of the invisible strings connecting the new people that come flooding into her life as well as thread the foreign environment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Frida, however, Marina is on the cusp of womanhood and therefore privy to thornier, more elusive human complexities, and this is where Romer\u00eda finds its anchoring emotional core.<\/p>\n That is because both of Marina\u2019s parents have died young, and not of complications of hepatitis like her father\u2019s death certificate claims. The two, who suffered from heroine addiction, contracted AIDS at the height of the epidemic. Much of Romer\u00eda is told through passages of Marina\u2019s mother\u2019s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at others maze. As the words echo in the teen\u2019s head, lingering in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a reality long-buried begins to become clearer and clearer.<\/p>\n The Spanish director broaches the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescendo. When some of Marina\u2019s many cousins sneakily roll some joints in the labyrinthine underworld of the family boat, they make sure to ease away each other\u2019s trepidations by remarking that a little bit of weed won\u2019t turn them into their parents. Then the uncles and aunties ruminate over lost friends and family, ressusciating the dead through the power of collective recollection. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either \u201caccidents, overdose, or AIDS.\u201d<\/p>\n But, despite a taste of confrontation when the film leaves the realm of the harbor and finally enters the family home and a brief, somewhat tonally misguided flashback, Romer\u00eda<\/em> is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.<\/p>\n To keep celebrating the craft of film, we have to rely on the support of our members. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n