Film Forum

Summer 2004 on the glistening Galician coast: 18-year-old Marina, a confident, budding filmmaker raised by adoptive parents seeks out her estranged paternal grandparents to obtain a signature required for her to attend university in Barcelona. Armed with a camcorder and her deceased mother’s 20-year-old diaries, Marina drifts into and around the emotionally unruly lives of her uncles, aunts, and cousins, who all orbit an imperious matriarch and superficially welcome her into the fold while evading her quest for answers.  What were her parents really like?  How did her father die?  Not all families have the courage to reveal or reconcile their secrets and their shame; thus Marina—and Simón—fulfill their missions via the power and beauty of the imagination.  

Presented with support from The Robert E. Appel Fund for Spanish and Portuguese Language Films

2025     112 MIN.      SPAIN / GERMANY     IN SPANISH, CATALAN, AND FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES      JANUS FILMS

Reviews

“Having drawn on elements of her family history in her début feature, SUMMER 1993 (2017), the Catalan director Carla Simón makes a lovely return to autobiographical terrain with this delicate portrait of an eighteen-year-old aspiring filmmaker, Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who embarks on a holiday with several extended-family members she barely knows... Simón brings down the emotional barriers with graceful assurance and an abundance of sun-dappled coastal imagery...”
– Justin Chang, The New Yorker

“Shot in Galicia, a landscape of rocky coasts and salty-blue air, this loosely biographical third feature from Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón, part of the Cannes competition slate, has a wistful, earthy glow. This is graceful, quietly intelligent filmmaking—including a touch of unsentimental magic realism involving a wise and beautiful Norwegian Forest Cat.”
– Stephanie Zacharek, TIME

★★★★ (out of 5) “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... Simón still shows her usual richness, warmth and her candid, almost docu-realist filmmaking 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.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A quiet, visually creative coming-of-age story... a vibrant film about all the scandals, divides, and connections that can be contained within families... A stunning portrait of loss and recovery.”
– Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

“An intensely personal portrait of a woman reconciling with her past... Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.”
– Kenji Fujishima, Slant