In Carla Simón’s latest film Romería, 18-year-old Marina (Llúcia Garcia) journeys to Galicia to meet her deceased father’s family. She’s trying to fix documents that suggest her father didn’t have a child, while searching for answers on who her parents were. Both of them died of AIDS-related illness, she never met her father, and she remembers little of her mother. But Marina does have her mother’s diaries from the 1980s. They’re the throughline between Marina’s unfolding present and her mother’s unstable past, one that constantly bristles against the recollections of Marina’s aunts and uncles.

Premiering at Cannes and now coming to the U.S., Romería explores how we reconstruct the identity of those we wish we knew through fractured memories. Again and again, Marina hears she is the “spitting image” of her mother, but what does it mean to look like a parent you only experience in your imagination?

To answer this question, Simón evocatively deploys primary colors, particularly red and blue, to conjure the image of blood. This motif connects Mariana’s parents’ death and our heroine’s contrasting, outcast identity from her estranged family. At one point, a title card for her fourth day on the trip reads: “Does sharing the same blood make you a part of the same family?”

Simón has spoken about the autobiographical nature of the film, as she similarly lost both of her parents to AIDS-related illness by the age of six. Likewise, Marina becomes an aspiring filmmaker, using a home video camera as a gateway to the past in her own language rather than her mother’s. Simón seamlessly blends the written and the witnessed in a dual diary approach to memory, contrasting the point of view of Marina’s camcorder with voiceover of her mother’s diary. A tender recurring technique, this combination speaks to the healing power of art, which seeks to cleanse and bring peace.

In this mode, Romería thins the veil between reality and imagination to capture a young woman’s desire for answers. The third act of the film devotes itself to these comforting fabrications, briefly moving away from the ensemble of characters to go back in time to Marina’s parents’ days by the sea. In doing so, the actor playing Marina’s free-spirited, stoner cousin Nuno (Mitch Martín) now plays her father, while Llúcia Garcia plays her mother. The choice dramatizes how history repeats itself, and more often than not, the spirits of those lost materialize again in the living.

One scene in this portion of the film leaves me breathless: Marina’s parents hit a dance floor with other young punks. They’re basking in “La Movida,” an era of political experimentation and counterculture in Spain that included an uptick in heroin usage. The choreography reflects the pain of a record scratch, with dancers slowly fainting and becoming ghosts – white sheets draped over their bodies. Eventually, the party is over, and nobody is dancing anymore.

“How many ways could you be young in the 80s?” displays the title card on day three.

For those who lost family members to AIDS, Romería is incredibly resonant and equally personable. A few years ago, I began interviewing relatives about my Uncle Carlos, whom I never met as he died from AIDS-related illness in 1993.

Just like Marina, I received juxtaposing reports from my father, my aunt, and several family friends. My aunt contentiously claimed that my uncle’s drug use pushed him toward a queer lifestyle, while a close family friend said she never saw my uncle using drugs. Still, they would often “disappear for a weekend” to go to the beach, to “just get away because he wanted to get away a lot, and often not to a physical place.”

Romería sees into the soul of my own experience with AIDS and memory-building. The film poignantly revisits a good time, where the touchstones were the water, the dance floor, and drugs. I may not have the clearest picture of my Uncle Carlos, but I do know that he loved to dance, had an infectious laugh, and first tested positive for HIV in Spain. I was told he often “partied like there was no tomorrow,” and Carla Simón’s film emphasizes the sad fact that for many people, that did end up being the case.

But Romería is a call for those of us left behind, encouraging us to pick up the pieces of the past, and float atop a dazzling, sun-kissed surface with them and those we’ve lost.

Romería is in theaters now.