No Oscar list this season will fail to have Alfonso Cuaron’s latest masterpiece Roma at the top. On critics’ minds: will the award be for Best Foreign Language Film or a straight Best Picture? But that’s not what’s on this director’s mind. Already an Oscar winner for Gravity, he turned his talents to a black & white, acutely detailed, Spanish and indigenous language realization of a key figure in his childhood, a maid he renamed Cleo who came to live with his family in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. A mother figure to him, from a disadvantaged class, he asks himself, what does she represent in the world of now?

Roma, says Cuaron, honors a sense of memory to form a narrative that builds upon narrative. He wrote his script hoping a narrative would build. Thinking more practically, the producer Gabriela Rodriguez told a post-screening crowd that included Michael Moore, Julian Schnabel, Gay Talese, Nick Pileggi and many others, at the Whitby Hotel, they had to borrow furniture from family members to honor Alfonso’s memory, to get the apartment just right, and recreate Mexico City in 1970, which they could do from photos; many iconic places had been damaged by a 1985 earthquake. And the cars! In one hilarious recurring image the family Galaxy fits into its spot like a hand in a tight glove. No one can steer it straight into the narrow parking space, laden with dog shit.

Cleo was cast after the film team had met 3,000 women from the far reaches of Mexico. From a town 4 hours away from the nearest city, Yalitza Aparicio had never heard of Alfonso Cuaron and at first refused to audition fearing this was a scam for human trafficking. When finally she was persuaded, she never saw a script but was told her lines each day before shooting. In a scene when she tells her lover that she is pregnant, she had no idea what he would answer back. And the crew was clueless too. Only Cuaron who did his own camera work, knew what would happen. After this role, Yalitza Aparicio has traveled far.

A Netflix production, Roma will open in theaters on November 21, and will stream soon after. Cuaron asserts that we need to preserve the theatrical experience, which, he admits, has become gentrified. Yalitza Aparicio has shown him another side of this debate. People in her community cannot travel to theaters. So, he says, Netflix is great.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura