Carla Simón Turned Her Family’s Deepest Tragedy Into Her Most Personal Film Yet

The Spanish filmmaker tells IndieWire about her latest movie memoir, "Romería," partly a fictionalized retelling of how her parents' romance and tragic death, which premiered at Cannes 2025 and finally opens in stateside theaters this weekend.

Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón has poured her own often harrowing, often close-to-sublime experiences of fragmented family life into all her films so far. There’s her feature debut “Summer 1993” about a six-year-old girl sent to live with her aunt and uncle, her follow-up “Alcarràs” about a rural farming family in Catalonia, and now “Romería,” about a budding teenage filmmaker turning her camera on the father she never knew and the mother she sort of did, who died of AIDS. Her latest movie memoir is a fictionalized retelling of how her parents fell in love, into drug addiction, and how Simón sought to chronicle that as a teenager.

Simón re-enters her own past like an emotional anthropologist, with some abstractions but often characters that are actually a stand-in for her: Take 18-year-old Marina, played by street-cast newcomer Llúcia Garcia, who travels to the seaside town of Vigo on the Atlantic Coast of Galicia to learn more about her father and her mother, in a movie set in 2004. In other words, when Simón, who is the adoptee of her aunt and uncle, was discovering the same things about her parents — including her mother, who only knew she was HIV positive when Simón was born, and died when the director was six.

“I have three very big families between the adoptive family and the biological family, so I feel I explored them all already,” Simón told IndieWire when asked if her forthcoming fourth feature would also take the form of an autobiography. No, actually, because she’s writing a musical.

“‘Romería‘ premiered at the same time that I gave birth to my second child, so it feels like it’s a moment to look to the future. Cinema has the possibility to get you to know worlds and universes that you wouldn’t somehow, no? That’s why, at the moment, I don’t need to explore my personal life anymore. Maybe I will go back. Everything is personal in the end,” said Simón, who lives in the beach town El Mansou outside Barcelona.

Simón’s new film — introspective, often visually breath-stopping, and lensed with glittering coastal beauty by cinematographer Hélène Louvart — premiered at Cannes 2025 in competition, went on to play at myriad festivals, and is only now opening in the United States from Janus Films. “It doesn’t prevent me from working on new things,” she said of the film’s tour and promo duties. “It’s allowed me to close something about my family, about my past, about my memory.”

In “Romería,” Marina travels to Galicia to convince the late paternal grandparents she hasn’t met to endorse a scholarship application to study cinema. Her father’s family is startled by her resemblance to her late mother, whose own diaries form the thread that not only led Marina to take on a family pilgrimage, but also created the 1980s-set voiceover narration that contextualizes the film in 2004. Marina, with a digital camcorder and only scattered memories, sets out to explore the family she didn’t know.

“It was a very difficult role to cast because she had to do two roles in one, Marina and her mom,” Simón said of casting her alter ego. Indeed, the film’s most ravishing sequence finds Marina stepping into her mother’s shoes, i.e., Garcia taking on the dual role of also playing Simón’s mother, during an ecstatic, even romantic, but eventually agonizing drug bender.

“There were girls who were very good for Marina, good for the mom, but both were complicated. At some point, we knew very well what we were looking for,” Simón said. “We had a crew, like two girls, who were going on the street trying to find this kind of teenager. She was found in Gràcia [the neighborhood in Barcelona]; it’s a very lively place, full of young people. She’s just coming back from a Boy Scouts meeting, and they stopped her and said, ‘Do you want to come to the casting?’ She was not trusting them so much at the beginning, but she ended up coming with some friends, who thought we were going to kidnap her or something [laughs] I could see the kind of teenager I was in her somehow. She was very innocent, but at the same time, she was very curious about the world.”

Llúcia Garcia took no acting lessons to prepare for her first role — her Marina is a bit enigmatic, a little hard to read, a mystery of a young woman with a face sometimes half-shrouded by a movie camera, restlessly curious. But Simón supervised three months of rehearsals prior to production with most of the cast, all of which the director filmed on her Handicam.

“One of the first things that I gave her was my mom’s letters, so I had this pack of letters that my mom wrote to her friends and family,” she said. “We turned it into a diary for the film. I just wanted her to get very familiar with… my story, but also the story of this generation. I also asked her to watch some films about drugs. At the beginning, I was like, maybe you should watch them with your parents, because she was so young. At the end, it was only her watching them.”

Indeed, Simón captures the madness and the intoxication and despair of being addicted to heroin in Spain in the mid-1980s, when Simón’s parents were at the peak of dependency; in the movie, Marina’s paternal grandparents refuse to acknowledge her father Alfonso’s death due to a pervading stigma around the disease, and homophobia.

The films Simón tasked Garcia with watching to get in the mode of playing Marina’s drug-addled mother in flashback included the Spanish 1979 arthouse horror movie about addiction, “Arrebato”; Jerry Schatzberg’s rueful New York story “The Panic in Needle Park” starring an often nodding-out Al Pacino; and Uli Edel’s anguished “Go Ask Alice”-esque German 1981 film, “Christiane F.”

“And then ‘More’ by Barbet Schroeder, which is perfect because it takes place in Ibiza, it’s also a love story about this couple. The way that they do drugs is old because it was ’69,” Simón said. The writer/director remembers the first day she asked her actors to perform the film’s crucial scene, which follows Marina’s parents as they get hedonistic at the Fiestas de Vigo and consume drugs, during rehearsal.

“We were in this room actually, where I am now, and I gave them a spoon and whatever I had to pretend, and we put on some music, and they got into this mood. We ended up having a trip without taking anything,” she said. “Obviously, we had someone who lived this time in the ‘80s, who had done heroin, and who came to give some advice to them, to me, in the shooting, in rehearsals.”

Simón said that through the intense autobiography — maybe her last onscreen — of “Romería,” she was able to get closer, and heal a bit, with her father’s family.

“One of my uncles, the one I’m most close to, he read the script. He came to the shooting, and at the end he played the lawyer,” she said. “My grandparents died a long time ago, so obviously they don’t know anything about the film, but the other uncles, they live in Galicia… they all understood my need to make the film, even though it obviously opened their memory as well. They all reacted towards the film in a different way, but not in a way that they are angry with me. They are OK. For some of them, it was actually healing. For some, it was a bit painful, but yeah, they are OK.”

“Romería” opens in select theaters from Janus Films starting Friday, June 26.