Critic's Notebook

The Criterion Collection

Ancestry has become a modern secular obsession. Centuries of migration, displacement, secrecy, and reinvention have left most people with at least one unresolved lineage question, and an entire cottage industry has emerged to answer it. Television programs like “Finding Your Roots,” now in its 12th season on PBS, have formalized the fantasy that identity can be recovered through archival diligence and DNA swabs. Even for those who are not famous enough for Henry Louis Gates Jr. to investigate personally, commercial testing kits promise access to a past that once required either aristocratic records or sheer luck. Yet the premise behind this cultural fixation — that knowing where you come from will clarify who you are — often collides with a more inconvenient truth. Families do not preserve history so much as curate it, and the deeper one digs, the more likely one is to uncover not only origins but injuries.

Carla Simón’s “Romería,” her autobiographical third feature, enters this terrain with a deceptively simple premise: a young woman attempts to retrieve the paperwork necessary to prove her identity. Marina (Llúcia Garcia Nuno), 18, must obtain a notarized attestation from her biological paternal grandparents in order to correct an omission on her late father’s death certificate and secure a university scholarship. The film, set in 2004, sends her to Vigo, in northwestern Spain, where what begins as bureaucratic necessity gradually mutates into something closer to an archaeological dig through competing versions of the past.

Ms. Simón is interested less in procedural hurdles than in the fragile authority of family narratives. Marina arrives to find herself greeted with warmth that is, almost immediately, stratified by omission. Conversations glide around certain subjects. Memories are offered with confidence but without corroboration. Against this curated oral history runs a second record: a diary kept by Marina’s mother in the early 1980s, which becomes an alternate account of the same events, written from an entirely different moral universe. The discrepancy between the two is not simply a matter of detail. It is structural. It suggests that what a family remembers and what a family permits itself to remember are often unrelated things.

The family’s behavior is almost understandable in context. Marina’s father was an addict who contracted AIDS in the 1980s, when Spain was still negotiating the long aftershocks of Franco’s dictatorship through a culture deeply shaped by Catholic conservatism and social shame. Yet understanding is not the same as absolution. Even by the standards of 2004, the relatives Marina encounters seem less interested in mourning the dead than in protecting themselves from association with him. The past here is not a shared wound but a managed liability.

What emerges is a portrait of a family practicing a form of retrospective public relations. Facts are not so much denied as redirected. Responsibility is diffused until it becomes unlocatable. Marina’s grandfather, faced with the legal necessity of acknowledging his son’s existence, would apparently prefer to resolve the matter with cash rather than documentation — a gesture so revealing it borders on farce. The refusal is not only emotional but bureaucratic: to recognize the dead on paper would be to solidify a history they have spent decades keeping deliberately nebulous.

Ms. Simón never pushes this into melodrama. The film’s outrage is cooler, more structural. It is interested in how stigma outlives the conditions that produced it, how a family’s moral reflexes can calcify long after the social panic has faded. AIDS, addiction, and Catholic respectability politics form the historical substrate of the story, but what matters more is their persistence in the present tense of the film. Marina is not simply encountering old prejudice; she is encountering prejudice that has never been revised.

Against this, Ms. Simón stages a quieter counterforce: imagination. Marina’s mother’s diary does not merely supply missing facts; it offers an alternative emotional narrative. In Marina’s mind, it becomes a tool for constructing scenes that never occurred but feel, in their way, as consequential as those that did. The film gradually suggests that this act of invention is not a retreat from reality but a way of surviving its omissions. If genealogy promises access to truth, “Romería” proposes something more unstable but more usable: the possibility that truth may have to be assembled rather than recovered.

This is where Ms. Simón’s autobiographical investment becomes most interesting. “Romería” is not a confessional work in the strict sense, even if it draws on personal history. The protagonist is not named Carla, and that distance matters. It allows the film to treat lived experience as material rather than testimony, something to be shaped rather than simply reported. The result is a work that is less interested in fidelity to the past than in the ethics of reconstructing it.

By the time Marina leaves Vigo, she has acquired something that resembles knowledge, though not the kind she was sent to find. The film quietly withholds the consolations that genealogical discovery is supposed to provide. There is no restoration of lineage, no clean integration into a recovered family tree. Instead, there is a more disquieting recognition: that some families do not preserve the past so much as defend themselves against it, and that what survives of history is often what has been least successfully repressed.

“Romería” ultimately arrives at a conclusion that is as unsentimental as it is unexpectedly tender. We are not only the heirs of our ancestors’ lives, but of their evasions. And if those evasions prove too entrenched to undo, then perhaps the only available counter-history is an imagined one — less faithful, perhaps, but more livable.