Review: 'Romería' is a tender and intense story of a young woman learning about the family she never knew, and finding her place among them.

Director Carla Simón’s “Romería” is much like the ocean where the main characters live — sunny and gorgeous on the surface, roiling and turbulent underneath.

Simón, who wrote the screenplay with her son, Neus Pipó Simón, tells a semi autobiographical story centering on 18-year-old Marina (played by Llúcia Garcia, in her first movie role). Marina is about to start college in Barcelona in 2004, but there’s an administrative hurdle she must clear first: She needs the family of her father, Alfonso, who died when she was little, to sign a notarized statement declaring that he’s her father.

Marina travels across Spain, from Barcelona on the Mediterranean to the Galicia area on the Atlantic, to meet Alfonso’s family. Her uncles and aunts are warm and generous, though a bit vague about certain memories of Alfonso. She spends most of her time hanging out with her teen cousins, who become the rambunctious siblings she never had. 

Meeting her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido) are a tougher nut to crack. Marina senses that there’s something about Fon, as her father is called, and her deceased mother that no one wants to talk about. 

One aunt drops a hint that Fon died in 1992, not in 1987, meaning she would have been old enough to meet and remember him. When her cousin, Suso (played by the single-named actor Mitch), lets slip that the family hid Fon away in his dying years, Marina’s uncle Iago (Alberto Garcia) reveals a hard truth: “It was common back then. … Everyone died behind closed doors.”

Simón uses a creative narrative device to let Marina learn the full story: She finds her mother’s lost diary, and visualizes her parents (played by Llúcia Garcia and Mitch) living together in a seaside tenement, in a life that starts romantic and ends tragically.

With Garcia’s heartbreaking and illuminating central performance, “Romerîa” becomes a tender and intense story of discovery — of a young woman encountering the family she never got to know, and finding herself and her place in that family in the process.

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‘Romería’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, nudity, drug use and language. Running time: 112 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.