Since BPM, Robin Campillo’s exuberant paean to queer activism, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2017, the Aids crisis has proven a remarkably rich seam for the French film festival’s most creative contenders. They have returned to the epidemic as historical memory and as a prism for contemporary anxieties about bodies and contagion.
Last year Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, a visceral body horror following a 13-year-old girl during an outbreak of a mysterious virus, mirrored the Aids epidemic’s social terror and physical transformation. This year’s competition includes The Man I Love, Ira Sachs’s eagerly awaited musical about the crisis, starring Rami Malek.
The revival of interest in the period makes sense for the Spanish auteur Carla Simón.
“Scientifically, things have changed a lot,” she says. “People can now live with HIV. But, socially, the stigma still exists. I think enough time has passed that we can revisit this history from new perspectives.”
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One of those is political: Spain has seen a recent rise in support for right-leaning parties such as Vox. The story her film tells “feels especially relevant now”, Simón says. “We don’t want to repeat the past.”
The Aids crisis casts a dark and mysterious shadow across her new film, Romería, which probes the intergenerational impact of the epidemic on the coastal city of Vigo, in Galicia, in the northwest of the country.
“The 1980s were a time of transition to democracy after Franco’s death, in 1975,” the film-maker says. “There was a sense of freedom, and young people wanted to experience everything they had been denied.
“There’s a theory – which I believe – that the government didn’t do enough to stop the spread of heroin, because it kept young people disengaged from politics during a fragile period.
“In Galicia especially, many young people became addicted without fully understanding the risks, and later this led to Aids. That generation has often been judged with blame and shame, but I think it was largely a matter of circumstance and bad luck.
“For me it was important to revisit that generation with empathy and recognise their role in transforming society: challenging conservative and Catholic values, and opening Spain up culturally.”
Simón first earned international attention with her debut film, Summer 1993, from 2017. That story of a young girl sent to the countryside after her mother’s death walked away with the award for best first feature at Berlin film festival. She triumphed again in 2022, winning the festival’s Golden Bear with the pastoral Alcarràs.
Romería turns the camera on her own buried past: it tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young woman, Marina, who is desperate to be acknowledged by her late father’s surviving family but has to contend with her paternal grandparents repeatedly deflecting her attempts, as they are still paralysed with shame about their son’s struggles with addiction. Both of the heroine’s parents, we learn, died of Aids.
The film is part of an accidental trilogy, according to Simón. “When I made Summer 1993 I didn’t know I would continue with these themes, but the ideas were already there. The frustration of not remembering my mother really emerged during that first film. That led me to explore her letters more deeply and, eventually, to this project.
“Now I feel like I’m closing a chapter. Especially since becoming a mother myself, my perspective has changed a lot.”
Romería is partly a reconstruction of the romance between Simón’s parents, who appear as ghosts in the film. The future director was born in Barcelona and remained in Catalonia during her formative years, raised largely by an uncle and his immediate family. Like her feature’s protagonist, Simón had lost both her parents to Aids by the time she was six.
As Romería opens, the year is 2004. Marina, played touchingly by Llúcia Garcia, is a film obsessive who has earned a scholarship to study cinema in Barcelona. One bureaucratic hurdle remains: she needs a notarised document to prove that her paternal grandparents are blood relatives. They have refused all contact with her since her father’s death left her to be raised by adoptive parents.
Marina duly treks across Spain to Vigo, where her warm-hearted Uncle Lois and a boisterous pack of cousins take her sailing and swimming around the Cíes Islands, where her parents spent their carefree youth, off the city in the mouth of Vigo’s river.
Marina records loose, camcorder-style video diaries; layered over these images are narrated excerpts from her late mother’s journal, written two decades earlier, and based on diary entries by Simón’s mother.
There are, however, notable truncations and deviations from reality.
“There’s actually a lot of fiction,” the director says. “I never lived the stories as you see them on the screen. I didn’t take this journey at 18. I actually met different parts of my family at different times and in different places. It wasn’t all at once, like in the film. The family structure is also different, and the side of the family I explore in the film is one I know less well in real life.
“So that part is more fictionalised. Small details are true: for example, my father loved sailing. But I changed the timeline of my father’s death, because it worked better dramatically for Marina’s journey. I feel very comfortable inventing what I needed to better tell the story.”
For Irish viewers it’s impossible not to think of The Image You Missed, Dónal Foreman’s film from 2018, which reconstructs the life and work of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig.
“I think the film comes from frustration – when you can’t know something,” Simón says. “Maybe the characters on screen are not exactly like my parents. I’ll never know if they are. But cinema allows you to create images that don’t exist.
“I can’t remember my parents. But memory doesn’t preserve facts. It preserves the last version we remember, so it’s constantly changing. Maybe what I create isn’t exactly what happened, but it’s what I need. We all need a story to understand where we come from.”
Moving away from the languid naturalism that defined the director’s earlier works, Romería is defined by liminal spaces. A ghost dance sequence marks a decisive turn from social realism into the explicitly supernatural.
Simón stages the apparitions not as ambiguous memories but as the spectral return of those lost to Aids, giving the dead a tangible, if fleeting, presence.
“Music was incredibly important in the 1980s, and the song we use comes from that era, when there were lots of bands, movements and parties,” the film-maker says. “It felt very natural to include it.
“I was also inspired by a traditional Galician ritual where people dress in white, almost like ghosts, and walk together. For me that connected to the idea of a generation that, in a way, cannot fully ‘rest’, because their memory hasn’t been properly acknowledged within their families.
“So I brought all these ideas together with the choreographer. It ended up being a simple but really joyful shoot.”
Simón’s trilogy has both coincided with a resurgence in Spanish cinema and become part of its focus on regional identity through films such as Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 Species of Bees and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Sundays, from the Basque Country; Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s nerve-racking The Beasts, from Galicia; and Alberto Rodríguez’s Marshland, from Andalucia.
That sense of place matters to Simón. Her films are based on familiar soil.
“I am Catalan on my mother’s side, but my father was Galician,” she says. “Landscape has a huge influence on my work. There’s a sense that the places remain while people pass through them.
“Galicia offers a wide variety of environments: urban areas, industrial spaces, the sea and very natural landscapes. The film was written with these locations in mind. But, for me, filming there was very emotional because it’s where my parents lived their story.”
Simón’s next project is a curveball: a flamenco musical. It’s a challenging venture for a film-maker whose previous work is so tied to her search for origin.
“Romería helped me let go,” she says. “I feel more at peace with not knowing everything. That search will continue throughout my life, but I’ve found a way to live with it. When I went to Cannes with the film I was eight months pregnant with my second child. I experienced the festival at a different pace. It felt symbolic. Like ending something and beginning something else at the same time.”
Romería is in cinemas
