Academy Award-winning Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón ends up taking his time between films. “Children of Men” (2006) and “Gravity” (2013) had a seven-year gap between them, and it’s been five years since the filmmaker’s aforementioned outers-space 3D thriller. But Cuarón finally returns this year with “Roma,” a film that’s Netflix bound and the company calls his “most personal project to date.”
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Details on the movie have been somewhat vague up until now. It’s been said to be a story that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s.
“Returning to my country with this specific project was something very personal because we made a film set in the ’70s, with many elements and experiences of my childhood,” Cuaron told press in Mexico at the beginning of production in 2017 “quite a universal story.”
It also apparently will include a significant historical event called the Corpus Christi Massacre, in which soldiers killed liberal student protesters. Meanwhile, the first, very brief teaser trailer has, and the tagline is: “There are periods in history that scar societies and moments in life that transform us as individuals.”
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Here are Netflix’s long-form details and synopsis which reveals more including the cast, including what seems like confirmation of the political tragedy at its center.
The most personal project to date from Academy Award®-winning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien), Roma chronicles a turbulent year in the lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. Cuarón, inspired by the women from his childhood, delivers an artful ode to the matriarchy that shaped his world.
A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, Roma follows a young domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma. Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), copes with the extended absence of her husband, Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia’s children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators.
Filmed in luminous black and white, Roma is an intimate, gut-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the ways, small and large; one family maintains its balance in a time of personal, social and political strife.
“Roma” is a Netflix release and will launch globally and in theaters later this year. The film was the center of film festival controversy earlier this year when Netflix acquired the film, and warring with the Cannes Film Festival over their French distribution rules, essentially pulled the movie from the Croisette (or Netflix blocked it, however you want to see it).
Before hitting Netflix and presumably some theatrical release for awards-season play, “Roma” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and while not official, the Telluride Film Festival as well. This mean’s everyone’s seen it on the festival programming end, and they consider it a must-see. A great sign. Here’s the teaser.
There are periods in history that scar societies and moments in life that transform us as individuals. pic.twitter.com/TOBHcvGb7T
— Alfonso Cuaron (@alfonsocuaron) July 25, 2018