Carla Simón lost her mother to AIDS, a legacy of heroin use, when she was six years old. Her father had disappeared from her life years before, presumably also dead, so young Carla, raised in boho Barcelona, ​​was taken in by family friends who worked on a small farm in the mountains. It was a profound dislocation for the motherless child, but it was also joyful, bucolic and loving: an idyll of pain. Her experience became the subject of her first feature film, 2017’s Wonderful. Summer 1993which immediately earned the director an international reputation.

However, it was the reaction to the film in Spain that took her by surprise. “At that time I had this website,” he says after the premiere of his new film Pilgrimagewhich also delves into his dark past. “The weekend after the release of Summer My email inbox was full of people saying, “You just told my story.” And I realized that it was super big.” Spain had a heroin epidemic in the ’80s; it also had the highest number of AIDS deaths in Europe, a collective pain that was barely talked about. “In Spain we always talk about how badly we remember the Civil War,” Simón says. “But this is also a historical memory that we needed to address.”

After Summer I had two possible next projects in mind. She chose to do Alcarrasan animated portrait of a family of tenant farmers about to be evicted from the orchard they have worked in for generations. That story came from his extended adoptive family; It earned him the Golden Bear in Berlin. His other project, still on hold, was about the love of his parents. She wasn’t sure about that. She had just had her own child; his inclination was to look forward. She had to do it, however, not only for herself but for all those people who wrote to her. “Because it was not just my story but the story of an entire generation.”

That story began with the death of General Franco, who ruled as dictator from 1939 to 1975. “It was really like a super Catholic place and the young people were very repressed. Then Franco died and then there was this explosion of freedom,” Simón says. It was the cultural moment of La Movida Madrileña. It was also, less happily, a substance abuse fest.

Simón’s father, descended from a wealthy family from Galicia, on the northern coast of Spain, loved the sea. Much of the time he lived on the family yacht, which meant he could receive deliveries of heroin.

“Heroin arrived through Galicia, where the coast is difficult to control. The Government did not do much to stop it,” says Simón. In some quarters, he says, there was a view that young people who used drugs would at least stay out of politics. “But it was about trying things, freedom and living in the moment. Then came AIDS.”

Growing up, he had nothing to do with his grandparents or his Galician clan. When he was 18 he visited for the first time; pilgrimage means pilgrimage. In the film, he fictionalizes his own story to become that of a young film student named Marina (played by local Llucia García, whom Simón saw getting off a bus). Apparently, Marina crosses Spain to pressure her grandparents to give her a signed copy of her father’s death certificate, which will allow her to apply for a scholarship to film school. However, deep down he is curious. Who are these people? Does it look like them?

“To understand who you are, you need to understand a little about where you come from,” says Simón. “I know some people don’t have this need but, maybe because I have a big family and I’m a filmmaker, I do.”

Most movies about outcasts searching for their estranged families are filled with anger. “They are angry because they feel abandoned, because they have lacked love, but I had no lack of love. I was absolutely fine!” says Simon. It is clear that the family is hiding a truth; It’s also clear that they are struggling to cope.

“It’s painful for them, so I also tried to tell the family’s story with empathy and understanding,” he says. He also didn’t want to judge his parents. “It was a very important generation that broke with all these old values,” he says. “We are where we are only because they turned everything upside down.”

Everything Marina knows about her parents’ affair is in her mother’s diary, which was based on real letters to friends. She is honest and direct but wants to see the places her mother mentions, visit her apartment, walk along the beach where they ran naked. The film switches between naturalistic and vividly improvised scenes of the family to become a distinctly fantasy film within the film, where Marina joins her parents on the balcony and is swept up in a surreal scene set in a dance club. Garcia acts as her own mother, while rock musician Mitch Martin plays Marina’s father and her favorite rogue cousin, Nuno. The sequence emerges like a dream.

“For me there was something about the idea of ​​spaces where people once passed and then when you return there, there is something spiritual that connects you to them,” Simón says. “But at the same time it’s frustrating because there’s nothing to tell you if they were here or there, if they lived in this building or that building, you know. Marina is looking for something but she doesn’t know if she’ll find it.” Still, she finds images that illustrate the words in her mother’s diary, whether they are accurate or not. “She can jump that imagination gap.”

At the same time, she discovers that her grandparents were caring for her dying father, keeping him secluded for years after she believed him to be dead. No one was allowed to see him; They were ashamed. Once again the story is essentially that of Simon himself. Not all of her uncles and cousins ​​are happy, even now, that she is speaking openly about the cause of her father’s death. “Well, it’s painful for them,” he says. “So I also tried to tell the family’s story with empathy and understanding.”

Some of the facts had been hidden from him, but some memories had simply been clouded by time. Beyond the story of Simón’s parents and their generation, this is a film about how memory works. “You try to put the pieces together, but everyone tells you the stories in their own way,” he says. “Because they become the protagonists of the stories: ‘I told this to your mother,’ or ‘She did this because of me.’

“And at some point I realized that even if my parents were alive, I still wouldn’t know the truth. Because the way we remember is that we remember the last time we remembered something.” Not the thing itself; It is memory that becomes truth. “So memories change all the time; we reconstruct them for our own convenience. But then I realized that I have cinema to create my own way of seeing. To create a story, even if I don’t know if it’s true or not.” And now it is true, we point out, because he has turned it into a new memory: the memory of his film. “Yes,” she agrees. “Now this is true.”

Pilgrimage opens in theaters on July 9.

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