Roma

Mexico City, 1970. An airplane crosses the sky while Cleo, a woman of Mixtec origin, cleans the floor of a house in the neighborhood of La Roma that belongs to an upper middle class family going through an inadvertent process of dissolution.Returning to his native country, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón partially abandons big productions for what begins as an intimate narrative that slowly transforms itself into a cathartic melodrama. Cleo, a domestic worker, and Sofía, the recently abandoned family matriarch, find out how their lives have much in common. Especially as their intimate universe is transformed and altered by both personal motives and an invasive social narrative that transits, without restraint and doubt, through their lives. Framed during the convulsive times of repressive state violence after the Halconazo – a historical student demonstration massacre –, Cuarón uses his magnanimous black-and-white 65mm perspective to show us a Mexico of contrasts, of clashes and confluences, of streets and scenarios that clearly denote the abysmal distances between social classes. But he does not forget to address the fragile internal beings of these characters who, in their multifaceted humanity, for better or for worse, find their convergence. (Pedro Segura Bernal)