In her Gold­en Bear-win­ning Alcar­rás, Car­la Simón meets a fam­i­ly stand­ing on the brink of a mon­u­men­tal life change, chron­i­cling the minu­tia of their lives as it begins to morph into some­thing for­eign. In Romería, this change lies in the past, where it remained flim­si­ly buried until the curi­ous hands of young Mari­na (Llú­cia Gar­cia) came to pluck it back to the surface.

The girl, raised by her mother’s fam­i­ly after becom­ing orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rec­ti­fy her birth cer­tifi­cate to include her bio­log­i­cal father so she can qual­i­fy for a schol­ar­ship. This bureau­crat­ic chore sees her trav­el alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nest­ed in the north­west­ern coast, where she is sud­den­ly not only no longer alone but sur­round­ed by dozens of fam­i­ly mem­bers she either has not met or has very lit­tle rec­ol­lec­tion of.

Romería stands for pil­grim­age in Span­ish, and the film is as much of a lit­er­al pil­grim­age in Marina’s long over­due home­com­ing as it is for Simon her­self. The semi­au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal dra­ma is set in 2004, and sees Mari­na try to make sense of this new expan­sive world sud­den­ly engulf­ing her through the low-qual­i­ty lens of a dig­i­tal cam­era. The direc­tor zooms into crooked wood­en alabasters and del­i­cate­ly swing­ing wind chimes, grasp­ing at tex­ture and sound with the vorac­i­ty of those who under­stand the stakes of fad­ed memories.

Like in her two pre­vi­ous fea­tures, Simon is most inter­est­ed in cap­tur­ing the intri­cate fab­ric of famil­ial rela­tion­ships mold­ed by the inti­ma­cy of time and sud­den­ly reworked by life’s tricky, unpre­dictable hands. Sim­i­lar­ly to six-year-old Fri­da in Sum­mer of 1993, Mari­na has to make sense of the invis­i­ble strings con­nect­ing the new peo­ple that come flood­ing into her life as well as thread the for­eign envi­ron­ment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Fri­da, how­ev­er, Mari­na is on the cusp of wom­an­hood and there­fore privy to thornier, more elu­sive human com­plex­i­ties, and this is where Romería finds its anchor­ing emo­tion­al core.

That is because both of Marina’s par­ents have died young, and not of com­pli­ca­tions of hepati­tis like her father’s death cer­tifi­cate claims. The two, who suf­fered from hero­ine addic­tion, con­tract­ed AIDS at the height of the epi­dem­ic. Much of Romería is told through pas­sages of Marina’s mother’s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at oth­ers maze. As the words echo in the teen’s head, lin­ger­ing in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a real­i­ty long-buried begins to become clear­er and clearer.

The Span­ish direc­tor broach­es the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescen­do. When some of Marina’s many cousins sneak­i­ly roll some joints in the labyrinthine under­world of the fam­i­ly boat, they make sure to ease away each other’s trep­i­da­tions by remark­ing that a lit­tle bit of weed won’t turn them into their par­ents. Then the uncles and aun­ties rumi­nate over lost friends and fam­i­ly, ressus­ci­at­ing the dead through the pow­er of col­lec­tive rec­ol­lec­tion. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either ​“acci­dents, over­dose, or AIDS.”

But, despite a taste of con­fronta­tion when the film leaves the realm of the har­bor and final­ly enters the fam­i­ly home and a brief, some­what tonal­ly mis­guid­ed flash­back, Romería is loy­al to its sense of with­hold­ing almost until the very end. It is then, final­ly, that Simon reach­es the grand apex of her jour­ney of self-reflec­tion, one that holds in the stun­ning clar­i­ty of care­ful­ly cho­sen words a mov­ing encom­pass­ing of how one can only build a stur­dy foun­da­tion for the future after lov­ing­ly repair­ing the unrec­ti­fied cracks of the past.

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How do you fol­low up an acclaimed debut? Amalia Ulman’s answer is to com­mit to satir­i­cal absur­dism whole­heart­ed­ly. Fol­low­ing her 2021 moth­er-daugh­ter com­e­dy El Plan­e­ta, Ulman’s Mag­ic Farm sees the direc­tor return to her birth­place of north­ern Argenti­na for a far­ci­cal tale of a self-absorbed VICE-esque film crew descend­ing on a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty to pro­file a local, bun­ny-ear-wear­ing musi­cian. How­ev­er, they soon realise they’re in the wrong coun­try (it didn’t occur to their pro­duc­er that there’s more than one San Cristo­bal) and must scram­ble to amend their cat­a­stroph­ic error.

Cast­ing her­self as Span­ish-speak­ing Ele­na, Ulman’s char­ac­ter stands apart from the out­siders as a native speak­er. She’s repeat­ed­ly caught in the mid­dle, trans­lat­ing for the kind-heart­ed locals and the crew as they fab­ri­cate a viral trend to save the doc­u­men­tary. Ele­na is part of the junior crew mem­bers along­side wannabe cow­boy Justin (Joe Apol­lo­nio) and Alex Wolff’s whiny Jeff ​“schem­ing lit­tle bitch” Berg­er who brings bound­less phys­i­cal com­e­dy, sprawl­ing over every soft sur­face and cow­er­ing in cor­ners in an attempt to escape the mess he’s got him­self in. Then there’s appre­hen­sive TV host Edna (Chloë Sevi­gny) and her hus­band and pro­duc­er (Simon Rex).

Though Rex and Sevigny’s appear­ances are sparse, Ulman has plen­ty up her sleeve with the younger trio hold­ing down the film’s diverg­ing sub­plots of a secret preg­nan­cy, a sex­u­al harass­ment scan­dal and the assem­bly of locals into a fic­tion­al reli­gious cult. The film’s abstract sense of humour nat­u­ral­ly stems from the lat­ter and the sur­re­al sit­u­a­tions that arise. Cumbia music and Latin Amer­i­can cul­tur­al nuances sprout from Ulman’s con­nec­tion to the coun­try and, like her char­ac­ter, her direc­to­r­i­al voice guides view­ers, trans­lat­ing as she goes but refus­ing to spoon-feed easy answers.

One of Mag­ic Farm​’s most com­pelling nar­ra­tive branch­es is an omnipresent health cri­sis that looms over the film. Locals, includ­ing a bemused hos­tel man­ag­er (Guiller­mo Jacubow­icz) and acci­den­tal doc­u­men­tary sav­iour Popa (Vale­ria Lois), mur­mur about undrink­able tap water and radio debates on the cor­re­la­tion between repro­duc­tive dis­or­ders and the tox­ic her­bi­cides sprayed on fields. This is the real sto­ry, one that they can’t (or refuse to) see. The igno­rant Amer­i­can arche­type is prod­ded play­ful­ly, but there’s a wider com­ment here about how press­ing sto­ries can eas­i­ly fly under the radar.

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Car­los Rigo Bel­lver tracks these bum­bling Amer­i­cans down wind­ing dirt roads and through colour­ful homes, chron­i­cling their sur­re­al expe­di­tion with equal­ly hyp­no­tis­ing imagery. Ulman’s per­for­mance art back­ground informs the film’s opti­cal odd­i­ties, like a 360-degree cam­era, a visu­al dis­tor­tion that places char­ac­ters on a plan­et of her own cre­ation, a blurred fish-eye effect and a ​‘dog cam’ GoPro. Like a visu­al awak­en­ing, these vibrant images inter­rupt when the script veers towards con­ven­tion. Mag­ic Farm may not be a blan­ket crowd pleas­er, but Ulman’s smart writ­ing lands in a deeply opti­mistic place about the pure mag­ic of human connection.

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