Latest news with #CarlaSimón
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Romería' Director Carla Simón on the Importance of Gender Equity in Filmmaking: Women Are ‘Half of the World, We Should Tell Half of the Stories'
Acclaimed director Carla Simón spoke about the importance of gender equity in filmmaking during her Kering Women in Motion Talk at Cannes on Friday, saying: 'We are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories.' The Spanish filmmaker, who premiered her new film 'Romería' in competition at Cannes Film Festival this week — one of seven women directors to do so — said female representation behind as well as in front of the camera is 'so important.' More from Variety 'Caravan' Review: Tender Debut Feature Focuses on a Single Mom's Experience with Her Disabled Son Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza Get Raunchy in Ethan Coen's Detective Movie 'Honey Don't!,' Earning Rowdy 6-Minute Cannes Ovation 'Once Upon a Time in Gaza' Review: An Altruistic but Scattered Palestinian Crime Farce 'I feel that we are advancing, little by little, not so fast. But at least things are changing,' she told Variety's Angelique Jackson. 'And I think we live in a moment [where] there's a historical reparation of themes that have always been told by men, and suddenly we take our perspective. And this is so important because we are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories in order to have a diverse look at the world.' Simón continued that this is 'so, so needed' because stories 'mark society' and are ultimately what help the world to evolve. 'I think little by little, we are getting there,' she said. 'It's fragile… I think we cannot stop talking about it and making sure that we don't go back.' 'Romería' is a personal film for Simón, as it follows an orphaned young woman who travels to the Spanish city of Vigo looking for more information about her biological father, who died of AIDS. There, she meets his side of the family, who are reluctant to revisit the past out of shame. The storyline closely mirrors Simón's own life, as both of her parents died from AIDS when she was 6 years old. 'It was born out of my frustration of not knowing much about my parents when I was a kid,' she said during the Kering talk. 'My family never told me clear things, and I had to kind of almost invent a story for them. And the film is about that, about the power of cinema to create the images that you don't have.' Watch the full conversation in the video above. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carla Simón's ‘Romería' Gets 11-Minute Ovation In Cannes Debut
Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón made her debut in the Cannes Film Festival competition on Wednesday afternoon, world premiering her latest work, Romería, to an 11-minute ovation. Simón, directing from her own screenplay, here tells the story of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old who was orphaned at a young age, and must travel to Spain's Atlantic coast to obtain a signature for a scholarship application from the paternal grandparents she has never met. She navigates a sea of new aunts, uncles and cousins, uncertain whether she will be embraced or face resistance. More from Deadline 'Romería' Review: Carla Simón Takes The Scenic Route For A Highly Personal Journey Of Self-Discovery – Cannes Film Festival Spanish Filmmaker Carla Simon Returns With Cannes Competition Title 'Romeria' — First Look Clip Sales Agency First Slate International Debuts With Genre Features Including 'Surviving Silence' & 'Those Who Call' - Cannes Market The experience stirs long-buried emotions as Marina pieces together the fragmented and often contradictory memories of the parents she barely remembers. This is Simón's third feature after Summer 1993 (2017) and Alcarràs (2022). The latter won the Golden Bear in Berlin and was selected as Spain's entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Those films were shot in the middle of the Catalonian countryside. With Romería, she embraces her Galician roots, mixing professional and non-professional actors. Simón has said Romería is 'a film about the importance of family memory: and about how to shape your identity. When you can't shape your identity through others, you can invent it through creation. Cinema is there for that: creating images that don't exist.' Ad Vitam has French distribution and mk2 is handling international sales. Best of Deadline 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Everything We Know About The 'Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping' Movie So Far Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Romería review – Carla Simón's gripping pilgrimage tackles Aids, parents and the legacy of secrets
Is biology destiny? Spanish film-maker Carla Simón brings to Cannes her very personal and in fact auto-fictional project Romería (meaning 'pilgrimage') – about an 18-year-old girl, arriving in Vigo in Galicia on Spain's bracing Atlantic coast. She is on a mission to find out more about her biological father who died here of Aids after he split from her mum, who has since died, too, and about her dad's extended – and very wealthy – family. Romería returns Simón (and her audiences) to the complex and painful subject of her mother and father, which she first approached in her wonderful autobiographical debut Summer 1993 although for me the more conventionally enclosed fictional transformation of the material there might have given that film a sharper arrowhead of storytelling power. Yet Simón still shows her usual richness, warmth and her candid, almost docu-realist film-making language, complicated here by a stylised hallucinatory sequence and a Super-8-type flashback section. Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything. Yet I wondered if in the end the film fully absorbed and reconciled two opposing needs: the angry need to reproach her extended family's cruel, uncaring treatment of her father and the need to find resolution and closure, to reclaim family membership and to be grounded in that identity. With unaffected grace and charm, Llúcia Garcia plays Marina, an easy-going, good-natured teen who shows up in Vigo in 2004 with her digital video camera, keen to meet her dad's folks – whom she hasn't seen in years. (These opening scenes are interspersed with quotations from her late mother's diary about coming to live in Vigo with Alfonso, or Fon, Marina's dad.) Her uncles and aunts, affectionate and enthusiastic and welcoming in their various ways about Marina, all have the same initial reaction, whose significance Simón cleverly reveals: they are stunned at her resemblance to her mother. It is as if Fon's wife has come back from the grave to stir up very mixed feelings. Almost immediately, Marina finds discrepancies between what she has always been told about her dad's life there with her mum, and what these people are now telling her. Part of her reason for being there is to locate official paperwork confirming Fon's paternity in order to get a grant to study cinema, and she is stunned to discover the family still do not acknowledge her as one of their own. Her existence is missing from Fon's death certificate. Now she has to persuade her cantankerous and difficult grandparents to swear an official deposition. And they clearly are wary of her – the tetchy grandma even claims that she does not look like her mother. Her grandpa just gives her a grotesquely huge amount of cash for her cinema studies – transparently a crude payoff to get her to go away. Because the awful truth is that they were angry and ashamed of Fon for suffering from Aids, due to needle use – Marina's mum used drugs, too, and it looks very much as if his parents created the myth that this wild-child woman got their son into bad ways and helped kill him. Now she is back – or rather her daughter is, a blood relation, and they have a learned neurosis about blood. Marina, at first nice and polite, starts to show her mother's fire. Part of this movie is about the perennial question which will fascinate and defeat all of us: what were our parents like before we were born? What was it like for them to be people just like us? It is at the centre of this distinctive, intelligent, sympathetic drama. Romería has premiered at the Cannes film festival
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carla Simón Uncovers a Galician Family's Skeletons in the Semi-Autobiographical ‘Romería'
After winning prizes at Berlin with 'Summer 1993' and 'Alcarrás,' Spanish director Carla Simón is now in the main competition at Cannes with 'Romería,' a deeply personal story about family and memory set in Galicia. The film tells the story of 18-year-old Marina, who travels to the northwest of Spain to meet her biological father's family. The girl's journey is one of discovery, as she has never met her father, who died of AIDS when she was young. More from Variety Kinky Sex, BDSM Alexander Skarsgard and Gimp Masks: 'Pillion' Seduces Cannes With 7-Minute Standing Ovation 'Pillion' Review: Edgy Queer Romance Stars Alexander Skarsgård as a Sexy Biker and Harry Melling as His Budding Submissive Richard Linklater on Trump's Film Tariff Threat: 'That's Not Going to Happen, Right? That Guy Changes His Mind Like 50 Times in One Day' Variety sat down with Simón to discuss the evolving Spanish film landscape, her latest creative choices and the emotional roots of her storytelling. Variety: Spanish films have gained recognition abroad in recent years, especially from new voices. What do you think is fueling this movement? Simón: I believe it's partly generational. A lot of filmmakers are experimenting, taking risks and embracing different directions. There's also a notable rise in female voices and a broader diversity of class backgrounds. People like me, from small villages or middle-class families, have found ways to study film and create work, even outside of formal cinema schools. Producers are trusting this new generation, and that momentum is creating something really special. One particularly striking trend is the number of successful female filmmakers from Catalonia. But in your latest film, you shift from Catalonia to Galicia. Why the change in setting? It's a personal one. My biological father was from Galicia, and my parents' love story began there. The film is about memory and identity, so it made sense to revisit those places. Galicia is a place I've visited many times, always in a kind of research mode. It's spiritually and visually unique, very different from inland Catalonia, and that contrast really helped shape the film. Galicia has a very distinct look and feel. How did that influence your approach to the film's aesthetics? The landscape changed everything. Galicia is green and coastal, whereas the Catalan countryside is more arid and brown. We shot in Vigo, an industrial city near the sea but not facing it directly. That disconnection was fascinating. We also switched from mostly handheld camera work in my previous films to more structured, composed shots here. It reflects the emotional distance Marina has from this family, unlike the intimacy of the other two films. In 'Romería,' the family is clearly upper-middle-class, very different from the rural, working-class families of your earlier work. Why this shift? Again, it's partially based on my real family, but there's a lot of fiction. I met my father's side of the family as an adult, and they were quite different from the world I grew up in. The film explores what it's like to be an outsider in your own family. Marina, the main character, connects most with another outsider, the younger brother. That tension, both emotional and class-based, gave the film a new dynamic. Marina experiments with filmmaking herself, capturing parts of her journey. How did you decide when to use her point-of-view footage versus the film's own lens? Her footage had to feel raw and imperfect; she's still learning. That contrast with the rest of the film was intentional. Her desire to film wasn't in the original script, but it made sense. She's looking for her own voice as a filmmaker. In a way, the story became partly about that process, why people film, what compels them to tell stories. For me, it's my family history that led me to filmmaking. Her mom's diary becomes a central piece of the story. Was that an intentional parallel with Marina's filming? Yes, absolutely. The diary is a generational portrait, it captures how people lived, loved and partied in the '80s. It's based on letters my own mother wrote to friends, which were very intimate. The film draws a parallel between that written account and Marina's visual diary. She's searching for something through her lens, and eventually she starts filming not just empty spaces but her new family too. There's an unreliable narrative element to the story. Everyone remembers things differently, and Marina uncovers contradictions as she goes. How did you approach the story structure? That was key. Memory is subjective; everyone reshapes it. When I researched my own family history, I realized no two accounts ever matched. That inspired the episodic structure of Marina meeting different relatives. Eventually, she understands that the truth might never be fully knowable. So she imagines it. That liberation, creating your own memories to form your identity, is at the heart of the film. You've always worked with large ensembles, but the family in this film feels particularly authentic. What's your rehearsal process like? We cast actors who naturally shared traits with the characters. Then we did extensive improvisations, scenes that wouldn't appear in the film but shaped the family's shared history. We even had the actors who played Marina's parents act out scenes from the '80s to help others understand their dynamic. The goal was to give them real, felt experiences of their roles. We rehearsed in the actual locations to lock in the physical and emotional space. It really comes through on screen. The family feels authentic, with all the unspoken tension and buried emotion. That's the most important part for me, capturing those quiet dynamics, the things that go unsaid. Every look, every silence matters. I'm glad that came through. 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Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Catalonia at Cannes: The Rise of a Cinematic Powerhouse
For the first time in history, two films from Catalan producers, Carla Simón's 'Romería' and Oliver Laxe's 'Sirat,' have secured coveted spots in the main competition at Cannes. This milestone signals the fruition of years of strategic investment, education and international collaboration that has transformed Catalonia into an emerging force of European auteur cinema. More from Variety Spcine Links With Hubert Bals Fund, South Africa's NFVF on Co-Development Initiatives 'Shōgun' Star Cosmo Jarvis to Lead 'Young Stalin' Biopic From 'Zone of Interest' Producer Access Entertainment (EXCLUSIVE) Al Pacino Joins Bobby Moresco-Directed Biopic 'Maserati: The Brothers' 'It's wonderful that things like this are happening, but it's not by chance,' says Oriol Maymó, the Catalan producer of 'Sirat' at Corte y Confección. 'This is the result of an industry that's been working with passion for many years, from institutions like ICEC [Catalan Institute for the Cultural Companies] to audiovisual training centers like ESCAC and Pompeu Fabra. Year after year, these schools produce highly skilled technicians and artists.' Indeed, education and institutional support form the backbone of Catalonia's cinematic surge. Executive producer Sandra Tapia points out, 'First, you need talent. Then, you need opportunities for training. Here, both public universities and film schools have been trusted for years to develop that talent.' The Catalan government, via ICEC, has played a pivotal role by not only financing productions but also promoting Catalan cinema internationally through Catalan Films. However, it's not just creative nurturing that's paying off. Catalonia's embrace of international co-productions has opened doors to broader markets. Both 'Romería' and 'Sirat' are backed by significant European co-producers, making them highly attractive prospects for global audiences. 'Romería' producer Maria Zamora highlights the long-term vision behind this shift, explaining, 'This is the confirmation of a new generation of directors and producers who have spent years working on the international reach of our projects from the very beginning, co-producing with other countries.' Zamora also emphasizes the cultural policies supporting young talent development: 'Talent isn't born on its own. It's encouraged through very specific cultural policies aimed at supporting young talent and auteur cinema.' Commercially, the effects are already visible. Maymó notes, 'I think Catalan films are becoming more marketable. Distributors and sales agents are paying closer attention because more projects are being made for wider audiences without losing their unique perspectives.' The creative evolution is palpable in the films themselves. 'Sirat,' co-written by Santiago Fillol and directed by Laxe, takes a gritty journey through Morocco's rave culture, while 'Romería' blends deeply personal memory with a universal search for identity. Though rooted in specific cultures, both films manage to resonate internationally. 'Very strong and deep-rooted cultures like Catalan, Galician or Basque create highly particular and genuine local stories that, because of their truthfulness, become universal,' Zamora explains. Sandra Tapia, an executive producer at Oscar-nominated Barcelona-based 'Robot Dreams' production company Arcadia Motion Pictures, adds another crucial dimension: the role of public broadcasters. TV3, Catalonia's regional television partner, has been instrumental in maintaining production momentum even as streaming platforms scale back commissions. 'Having strong public TV is crucial,' Tapia asserts. 'It ensures that when the market contracts, filmmakers still have vital support.' Of course, the success at Cannes also reflects the growing sophistication of Catalan producers in navigating international markets. 'Younger producers like us are much more comfortable traveling to markets, pitching internationally and co-producing across countries,' Tapia says. However, she points out a lingering challenge: Spain still lacks the robust international distribution support that countries like France provide. 'Public support often only kicks in once you've already succeeded at a major festival,' Tapia laments. Yet the momentum is undeniable. Zamora describes it as a movement that has been building strength for years: 'I remember when I started going to co-production forums 15 years ago, there were just two or three Spanish producers. Now, there are scores of young producers with projects everywhere.' Catalonia's cosmopolitan nature has also made it uniquely adept at building cross-border partnerships. 'Catalonia has been very open to supporting important and emerging auteurs,' Zamora notes. 'It's about more than just local projects – it's about packaging important productions that can resonate internationally.' The selection of 'Romería' and 'Sirat' at Cannes isn't an outlier. It is a manifestation of a rich, deliberate evolution within Catalan cinema, one that values artistic ambition and commercial strategy equally. As Maymó puts it, 'If we keep believing in our industry, investing in broad-audience projects without losing our personal voice, Catalonia's presence at major festivals will not just continue, it will grow.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
