‘Romería’ Trailer: A Lyrical Search for Family Secrets on Spain’s Coast, Perfect for the Summer Movie Season

Exclusive: Watch the trailer for Carla Simón's Cannes 2025 premiere about a budding filmmaker who heads to Galicia to understand, and perhaps document, her past.

One of the most visually, sonically gorgeous movies to play the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón’s “Romería” finally gets a proper theatrical release in 2026. Here, Simón and her breakout star Llúcia Garcia chase biological destiny to Spain’s Atlantic Coast in a coming-of-ager that looks beautiful under cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s (“La Chimera”) eye. IndieWire debuts the trailer exclusively below ahead of the June 26 release of a movie that feels expressly tailored for the summer season.

Newcomer Llúcia Garcia, in her first major film role and whom the Spanish director found on the street amid a wide-ranging casting call for actors to play an 18-year-old woman at a pivotal spiritual turn, becomes the surrogate eyes and ears who embody Simón’s real-life story: Simón’s parents died of AIDS when she was a small child, sending her to northern Catalonia with an uncle. She was left, as a hardly formed six-year-old, to contend with little knowledge and fewer memories of her parents.

As I wrote in my Cannes review, this film finds the “Alcarràs” and “Summer 1993” filmmaker “operating behind her most intensely personal lens yet. Where her family history was previously abstracted in her prior films about families fractured by circumstance, Marina (Garcia) is now a stand-in for the director, here a budding moviemaker herself, who travels to Galicia to convince the late paternal grandparents she’s never met to endorse a scholarship application to study cinema.”

More on the film from Janus: “A beautifully rendered autobiographical tale, ‘Romería’ is celebrated Spanish director Carla Simón’s touching portrait of family origins. In a bravura performance, Llúcia Garcia stars as 18-year-old Marina, who travels to the glittering seaside town of Vigo determined to uncover information on her father. Gradually tracking down his siblings, she slowly learns uncomfortable secrets about her parents’ unconventional life and turbulent past. Beyond a tour de force coming of age story, ‘Romería’ offers a moving, trenchant investigation on how family connections form new identities.”

Distributor Janus Films also backs the similarly, intensely personal autofiction “Blue Heron” from Sophy Romvari, which is now in theaters.

Janus Films opens “Romería” theatrically in the U.S. starting June 26, with Films We Like taking it out in Canada beginning July 3.

Watch the trailer below.