Pilgrimage, the film that closes Carla Simón's family trilogy afterSummer 1993 and AlcarràsIt has received thirteen nominations for the Gaudí Awards, which will celebrate their 18th edition on February 8, 2026, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Simón's film leads the awards race along with SiradoOliver Laxe's film, which garnered twelve nominations, was announced by Laura Weissmahr and Dani at an event held this Tuesday at La Pedrera. The event was attended by the president of the Catalan Film Academy, Judith Colell, who is also nominated this year for her period drama. Border

The family, as we know, is first-rate literary material; I would even say it's an inevitable inspiration. The family has largely made us who we are, and it makes us see the world in a certain way, sometimes to follow the line marked out for us, sometimes to flee or go against it.

In Lagoons, a short film prior to Summer 1993 (2017), Carla Simón recovers the letters and some videos of Neus Pipó, her mother, while traveling through the landscapes she traveled through decades before. The film ends at the Hospital del Mar, with the camera focusing on the horizon while we hear Neus's last wishes, who before dying names her brother as legal guardian of her daughter Carla. The beginning of Pilgrimage connects with that ending to fill in some of these gaps. Marina (Llúcia Garcia), a young audiovisual communication student, travels by sea from Barcelona to Galicia to obtain official recognition from her paternal family. The diary she wrote to her mother about her stay there serves as a guide.

Three Catalan productions have been shortlisted by the Spanish Film Academy to represent Spain in the race for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film: Pilgrimage of Carla Simón, Sirado ofOliver Laxe and Deaf Eva Libertad. The reading of the nominated films was conducted by two Spanish academics who are also members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: actress Emma Suárez and actor Juan Diego Botto. They were accompanied by the president of the Spanish Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite, and notary Eva Fernández Medina. Spain's representative at the last edition of the Oscars. was Second prize, which ultimately failed to achieve a nomination from the Hollywood Academy.

The diary of a mother of whom she has few memories is the map that Mariana (newcomer Lucía Garcia Torras) uses in Pilgrimage to explore the memory of her biological parents, who died of AIDS when she was a young child. The new film by Carla Simón, which premieres this Friday, examines the silences and taboos that persist in the memory of a Galician family through the inquisitive eyes of a teenager who makes a pilgrimage to the sacred land (where her parents were young and happy) in search of their legacy. But Pilgrimage It is also a bittersweet invocation of the wandering spirits of a cursed and massacred generation, a cinematic act of poetic justice and personal dignity.

In 2016, a year before directing Summer 1993, Carla Simón made a short film, Lagoons, based on texts from the letters she kept from her mother, Neus Pipó, who died of AIDS in 1993, and a fragment of a home movie in which a young and carefree Pipó appeared wiping the sleep from her ears. A decade later, having become the Catalan filmmaker of reference for a new generation of directors, Simón returns to her mother's letters, now transformed into phrases from her mother's diary that a teenager reads during a trip to Galicia to meet her father's family, who died when she was young, just like her mother. The desire to put images into the parents' love story and, above all, to know who those people were that she doesn't remember runs through Pilgrimage, Simón's third feature film, the latest installment in the extraordinary universe the director has built from her intimate family materials.

It is still beautiful that Carla Simón (Barcelona, ​​​​1986) present Pilgrimage At the Cannes Film Festival, she was more than eight months pregnant, or as she herself says, "very pregnant and ready for whatever may happen," because the film is a daughter's love letter to parents she lost too early and of whom she barely has any memories. The third film by the director ofSummer 1993 and Alcarràs accompanies a Catalan teenager with the desire to study film on her trip to Galicia to meet her paternal family and the places where her parents' love story took place. Pilgrimage, who speaks Catalan, Spanish and Galician, once again demonstrates Simón's extraordinary talent for capturing the rhythms of life and the secret language of families, but in the second half of the film he also opens a new door in his cinema, a freer and more fantastic one that abandons the strict realism of his previous films.