Hélène Louvart, AFC, looks back at the filming of "Romería", by Carla Simón

Marina, a young student who was adopted as a child, is searching for administrative documents to enroll in university. Through her search and this journey of discovery in the Galician city of Vigo, she uncovers the secrets and truths of her family’s past
The film is inspired by Carla Simón’s own story. 
Starring (among others) Llucia Gárcia, Mitch Martin, Myriam Gallego, and Tristan Ulloa.

One can imagine that this very personal subject was not easy to tell and put into images. Did it require a lot of preparation?  

Hélène Louvart : Yes, indeed, we prepared this film a lot. We went to Vigo several months in advance to scout locations and soak up the atmosphere of the region. Then we worked scene by scene in Zoom meetings to establish the shot list in the actual locations. Carla also rehearsed with the actors, a mix of professionals and non-professionals. In the scenes where we were filming the family, with cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents, the movement of the characters became a kind of choreography, which we reproduced in floor plans. The dinner scene was filmed with two cameras in collaboration with Catalan operator Ramon Sanchez.

The distinctive feature of Romería is that it combines two narrative levels, providing an opportunity to offer a different image while maintaining the unity of the film. This raised questions before shooting...

HL : The director not only recounts this young girl’s encounter with her paternal family, but also depicts her imaginary thoughts about the parents she never knew. So there are two narrative threads: a realistic aspect with the paternal family when Marina (Llucia Gárcia) was 18, in the 2000s, where the focus is on everyday life in this encounter with uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins.
Then there is a more dreamlike aspect to the scenes with her parents, which she obviously had to imagine in the 1980s. We didn’t want to embellish the past or create images that were too “filled with happiness” to evoke her parents. But we still needed to feel a difference between Marina’s everyday life and her mental journey to her parents. The subtlety that reinforces the dreamlike quality of these scenes lies in the fact that it is the 18-year-old girl who plays her own mother, and her cousin from her father’s side of the family who plays her father.

This obviously raises the question of how to juxtapose these two narrative threads, realism and fantasy, with a twenty-year gap between them, in a way that is visually understandable...

HL : The shot breakdown is different because the point of view is different, but if you trust the story, you understand that you’re no longer in the real world, so we don’t have to justify it any further in the images. And between filming an entire family and filming two people who love each other, the filming is necessarily different because the situations are not the same.

There is a third point of view, Marina’s, which adds an even more personal touch to the story.

HL : Indeed, this young Marina wants to study film and arrives in Vigo with a Handycam that she uses frequently, which obviously makes the film very autobiographical! Again, it was important to show the difference in vision with a different way of filming. We did some tests before shooting and then tried out different textures during color grading, playing with the “progressive” and “interlaced” rendering of the medium. Carla always had this little camera in her hand—the Sony HXR-NX80—and she frequently filmed the spaces, putting herself in the shoes of this 18-year-old girl.

You shot on a sailboat, both during the day and at night. Tell us about your work on these scenes.

HL : The daytime scenes that took place on the pontoon were shot on the Ria de Vigo, which is an inlet, so it’s calmer than the open sea, with a small crew, mainly using the Ronin 2 to easily compensate for the bubble. The daytime scenes in the cabins and the night scenes were shot at the dock with the full crew and outdoor lighting (HMI or SkyPanel) and Astera lights on the ceiling indoors. For other scenes, not just on the boat, we also shot with the Ronin, so I opted for Angénieux EZ series zooms, 16-42mm and 28-76mm, to avoid having to rebalance the Ronin every time the focal length changed.

Another important setting is the grandparents’ house. What kind of setup did you work with there?

HL : We had a view of the sea through the bay windows, and Carla and I wanted the outside to remain visible. So we had to maintain a natural atmosphere while enhancing the lighting inside, using HMI through the windows, tulle frames or gels on the windows, and LED projectors with softboxes on the ceiling.

Did you use VFX, particularly for the scenes where the same actress plays both characters, Marina and her mother?

HL : Yes, for the meeting between the mother and daughter, we shot in split-screen mode to superimpose the two characters. When there was physical contact between the mother and daughter, we obviously used the "face replacement" technique for a few shots with a body double. We storyboarded these scenes in advance.

This double-layered narrative is all the richer when it is supported by the images. It’s a very exciting challenge in your line of work...

HL : Yes, it’s a very interesting scenario. Bringing to life parents that Carla never knew, even if it’s only on film, is a way of making them "real". Carla has embraced the possibilities of cinema to create a work that transcends reality. She has also managed to reconstruct this world of family secrets from her adult perspective, avoiding the pitfall of judging her paternal family.
I worked with an entirely Spanish team, some of whom I already knew from previous collaborations (Catalans) and new collaborators from the Galicia region.

(Interview conducted by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)