2018 | Black & White | 135 min.
The most personal project to date from director and writer Alfonso Cuarón, 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 amid political turmoil, Roma follows a young domestic worker of Mixteco heritage, Cleo, and her co-worker Adela, also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma. A mother of four, Sofía copes with the extended absence of her husband; Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofía’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 Sofía 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.
Direction: Cuarón, Alfonso
Script: Cuarón, Alfonso
Production: Célis, Nicolás | Cuarón, Alfonso | Rodríguez, Gabriela
Production Company: Esperanto Filmoj | Participant Media
Photography: Cuarón, Alfonso
Edition: Cuarón, Alfonso | Gough, Adam
Sound: Díaz, Sergio | García, José Antonio | Henighan, Craig | Lievsay, Skip
Cast: Aparicio, Yalitza | de Tavira, Marina | Demesa, Daniela | García, Nancy | Graf, Marco | Peralta, Carlos
Art Direction: Caballero, Eugenio
Year of participation at FICM:
2018
Films by the same director presented at FICM:
Paris, je t´aime (2006)
Gravity (2013)
Y tu mamá también (2001)
Y tu mamá también (2001)
