Review - Romería

Starring Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Martin, Tristán Ulloa, Alberto Gracia. Written and directed by Carla Simón. Unrated. 114 minutes. In theaters.

For a lot of us, it’s difficult to imagine what our parents were like when they were young. For Marina, it’s impossible because nobody wants to talk about them. A detective story of the heart, writer-director Carla Simón’s semi-autobiographical, hugely moving “Romería” is about an 18-year-old girl trying to figure out who her mom and dad were. They died when she was too young to remember them and Marina was raised -- quite happily, it seems -- by adoptive parents. Now she’s off to film school in the fall, but first needs her biological father’s death certificate in order to apply for financial aid. Marina travels to the Galicia region of Spain and meets a whole bevy of aunts, uncles and rambunctious cousins while waiting on an audience with the wealthy grandparents she never knew she had. Everyone’s warm, friendly and they don’t say much about her father. When they do, it’s in hushed tones and their stories seem to contradict each other.

“Romería” doesn’t make it easy on the viewer in the early going. Marnia carries with her a copy of her mother’s diary, and the film discombobulatingly alternates entiries with her daughter’s own observations some 20 years later. We’re as overwhelmed as Marina is trying to keep track of all these new relatives, and just as mystified as to why she can’t seem to get a straight answer from any of them. Shot by the superb cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose handheld poetry is key to the films of Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman, “Romería” is a little confounding at first, but never less than visually ravishing. Llúcia Garcia, who plays Marina, has one of those captivating faces that can hold the camera all day. She even looks great with bangs.