Janus Films has secured all North American rights to Romería, the new film from Spanish auteur Carla Simón (Alcarràs, Summer 1993). Janus snatched up the feature following its competition premiere in Cannes and ahead of its North American debut at the New York Film Festival.
Romería follows 18-year-old Marina, the daughter of drug addicts who died young of AIDS, who travels to the Atlantic coast of Spain to meet her paternal grandparents for the first time. As Marina navigates this extended family she has never known, she attempts to piece together memories of her parents alongside stories held by relatives, each with their own secrets. Like her debut Summer 1993 and the Berlin Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Romería is broadly autobiographical, inspired by the director’s life and family.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Simón said the desire to make Romería came out of “my I frustration of not being able to know my parents’ story.” After first trying to cobble together their story secondhand, from research and interviews with friends and family, she realized that “memory is very subjective. You try to put pieces together, but they never quite match,” and chose to imagine or invent much of her parents’ story. “I think [this film comes more from this desire to build a story, to build my own identity. Through film, I could invent what I needed to invent to tell this story that I feel nobody else could tell me.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s chief film critic David Rooney gave Romería a mixed review out of Cannes, noting the film felt “more visually beguiling than intimately involving,” and that Simón “dives deep into painful family history in an act of reclamation that’s equal parts shimmering and meandering.”
A Spanish-German co-production, Romería was produced by María Zamora at Elastica Films with Olimpia Pont-Cháfer at Ventall Cinema and Àngels Masclans at DosSoles Media, with cinematography by Hélène Louvart (La Chimera, The Lost Daughter).
The deal was negotiated by Janus Films and mk2 Films, who are handling world sales. Janus has picked up several Cannes titles for domestic release this year, including Lav Diaz’s Magellan, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors.
Janus is planning a theatrical rollout for Romería next year.
