Carla Simón’s films are deeply shaped by memory, loss and the emotional afterlives of family history. The Catalan filmmaker first broke through with Summer 1993 in 2017, a quietly devastating portrait of a young girl readjusting to life with relatives in rural Catalonia following the death of her mother from AIDS – an experience drawn from Simón’s own childhood, after both of her parents died from the illness. She then followed with her second feature Alcarràs, an earthy portrait of a farming family on the brink of change, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2022.
With her latest film Romería, Simón completes the quasi-autobiographical trilogy, shifting from the sun-drenched Catalonian countryside to the Galician port city of Vigo. Romería follows the story of Marina, a young woman attempting to piece together the lives of her late parents through memory, imagination and fragmented family stories.
In our conversation, Simón reflects on the influence of home videos in her filmmaking, collaborating with writer Xulia Alonso Díaz and cinematographer Hélène Louvart, and how therapy shaped this final chapter.
Laura Stratford
When did you first pick up a camera?
I’m not sure… Nobody’s ever asked me that question! Can you believe this? I don’t remember, to be honest, but I do remember when I was 18, I was given a video camera as a present and I remember crying like crazy because it was the thing that I wanted the most. It was a handycam. Really small but quite professional with Mini DV tapes, which I used a lot, and obviously the first thing that I did was film my family.
I think when you film people you love, you film them in a very specific way and you can tell that by the images. You feel the love and you feel the interaction between the person who is filming and the people. In cinema, this is something that you cannot have because the camera’s kind of like another point of view, from outside. So, those videos are very precious to me. I have kids now so sometimes I use a handycam and film them but it’s different. Something about the way that I used to use the video camera back then which was very special.
I guess it's a kind of innocence, isn’t it? In those initial stages, you’re playing with the camera and the medium.
Absolutely, and there’s something about home video that, for me, is the best way to express things happening at the same time. When you are filming, in a big family, there are many things always going on, but you choose one thing to film; and then in terms of sound, there are many other things that are happening at the same time. There is something about the way I work with sound and its simultaneity which I learned from making these videos and you can see that in Alcarràs and now with Romería, in scenes where there are many people.
Can you tell me more about Vigo, where Romería is set?
My biological dad’s family was from Vigo and my mum spent a few years there as well. Vigo in the 80s was really the place to be, you know, because there were a lot of bands and a lot of parties, and many people would go. It’s an interesting place which has changed a lot over the years, and it’s a very industrial city because of the shipyards. For me, it's like each time that I go there, I connect with my parents somehow. Places stay in people’s pasts, which is magical, so it was beautiful to go back there and shoot. It was also cool to make a change from filming the rural countryside to the sea, which is a very alive kind of place. 
When I was walking out of the auditorium, after watching Romería at London Film Festival, I heard a couple of people saying how the use of heroin in your film didn’t look that bad, and I thought it raised an interesting question of whether we always necessarily need to present it in such a graphic and violent way. Did that conversation ever come up in the making of this film, your portrayal of it?
Yeah, that was a big question - should we show it or not? At the beginning, I didn't write it in the script but then at some point I thought we really have to see it because Marina’s trying to imagine how it was and she cannot skip this part, so it’s important. At the same time, I didn’t want heroin to define these characters. When you watch films about heroin, they are usually depicted like trips to hell, and it can be sordid. The way I understand my parents living with heroin isn’t like that. I wanted to portray it without romanticising it, but also without being too cruel. Plus, when you talk to people who have used heroin, they talk about it in a very poetic way, as if it was a ritual that you do with other people.
Mitch, who is the actor who plays Nuno, Marina’s boyfriend, looks like someone who came from the 80s. He’s a musician, so he likes this kind of music – he really is from another era. He spent time with people who had taken heroin, as research for this role. We also worked with Xulia Alonso Díaz, who wrote a beautiful book called Futuro imperfecto, about her personal experience with heroin and having survived it. She gave this book to me when I was making Summer 1993 and we became friends after that. When we filmed the scene of Nuno and Marina experiencing withdrawal symptoms in Romería, Xulia was there to make sure that their portrayal of it felt authentic.
After watching Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, I thought it was interesting that Romería didn’t have the same outpouring of emotion in its finale that those films had.
I must confess that at some point this crossed my mind but then I thought, she cannot cry at the end. I realised that for Marina’s character, the way she frees herself is through her imagination. That’s her outlet. And you know, from my own personal experience when you’re rediscovering your roots and you meet people that are your family but you might not feel that connection to, your emotions are so mixed. It can be painful to navigate that and I never cry in those moments, but later.
I’ve been reading about how you explored therapy and dream work in the making of this film, I’d love to know more about that.
I had a dream once where I found my mum and I was like, ‘I thought you were dead?’. She was like, ‘No, I just had to hide’. This thing about being hidden, I remember. I hadn’t dreamt of her much but this was a dream that stayed with me and I thought it made a lot of sense – the link between hiding and living with AIDS.
I also did two kinds of therapies whilst I was writing the script for Romería: dreams and transgenerational memory. The first is about analysing your dreams, which helped me to understand how dreams work; and dreams and imagination work very similarly. We imagine things that we’ve lived before, so all the mirrors between reality and fantasy inspired the dream scene in the film. The second is about exploring the kinds of experiences that your ancestors had that may have affected you. It’s very complex but it’s very interesting because it helps you to find the reason for some aspects of your personality. It’s done through a kind of hypnosis. It’s called brainspotting. You look at a stick and the therapist guides you and you keep associating images and through that, I kind of imagined me living a whole party with my parents, and with my cousins as well. I was writing the script at that time, so these experiences shaped that process.
I was entranced by the fantasy sequence - the visuals and the choreography, the cloaked figures performing a dance with death. What was it like working with acclaimed cinematographer Hélène Louvart? So many people in our community admire her work, especially her collaborations with Alice Rohrwacher.
Hélène is someone who really prepares for a film. She has an enormous talent but she is also an extremely hard worker. For me, it was very beautiful to go to locations together, and collaborate together. I knew we couldn’t film the family in Romería the same way that I filmed families in my other other films. So we went for a more cold and distant camera for the sequences that take place in the present, and kept the playful, hand-held approach when filming the dream sequences. We had many conversations that led to this conclusion, and drew from some references as well to make it more cinematic.
What’s next for you?
We’re prepping a flamenco musical, which is a step away from realism – I’m excited about it.
Carla Simón’s Romería is now showing in cinemas across the UK & Ireland. Shop our CARLA SIMÓN t-shirt here.