Alfonso Cuarón's autobiographical Mexico City drama. The Netflix release that won Best Director and almost won Best Picture.
Mexico City, 1970-1971. Cleo, a young Mixteco woman, is the live-in domestic servant for an upper-middle-class family in the Roma neighbourhood. The family consists of a doctor, his wife Sofía, four children, the children's grandmother, and a second domestic worker. Cleo's days consist of cleaning the courtyard, walking the children to school, preparing the family's meals, putting them to bed. The film unfolds in slow, observational sequences across roughly a year. Cleo becomes pregnant by a karate-practising boyfriend who abandons her on learning of the pregnancy. The family's father leaves the mother. The family's economic situation tightens.
The film's most-discussed sequence is the Corpus Christi massacre of 10 June 1971 — a real-life event in which the Mexican government's paramilitaries killed roughly 120 student protesters. Cleo, who is shopping for a baby crib during the event, witnesses the killings and goes into labour. Her child is delivered stillborn. The film closes on Cleo's near-drowning saving of two of the family's children at a beach and the family's return to Mexico City.
Roma is Alfonso Cuarón's most-personal film. The film is structurally a recovery of Cuarón's own childhood — specifically, of his family's domestic worker Liboria 'Libo' Rodríguez, who raised him through the 1970s and to whom the film is dedicated. The film's narrative material is, in large parts, Cuarón's actual memory.
What makes the choice unusual is that Cuarón centres the film not on his own childhood self but on the domestic worker. The film is, structurally, about Cleo. The children — including the young boy clearly meant as Cuarón's self-portrait — are background figures. The film's argument is that the actual moral and emotional weight of the 1970s upper-middle-class Mexican household sat with the indigenous-Mixteco woman who held it together, not with the children who would later remember it. The choice is the film's specific seriousness.
Yalitza Aparicio was a 24-year-old preschool teacher in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca when she was cast as Cleo. She had no prior acting experience. Cuarón cast her after months of casting calls in indigenous Mexican communities across multiple states. Her lead performance is one of the most-respected debut leads in 2010s cinema.
What the performance does is honour the structural difficulty of the role. Cleo is largely silent. The film's emotional register is built on her face, her physical comportment, her response to interactions with her employer family. Aparicio's specific lack of screen-acting training is, in this case, the performance's foundation — her reactions read as genuine rather than constructed. Aparicio was nominated for Best Actress at the 2019 Oscars, becoming the first indigenous-Mexican actress nominated in the category.
Roma was distributed by Netflix, the streaming service's first major prestige feature. Cuarón had been a longtime collaborator with Mexican producers; the film's budget (roughly $15m) had been refused by traditional studios as too small to bother with for a black-and-white subtitled Mexican-language film with non-professional leads. Netflix paid for the film and committed to a small theatrical window for Oscar eligibility.
The film won three Oscars at the 2019 ceremony (Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography). It lost Best Picture to Green Book in one of the most-debated Academy decisions of recent years. The structural significance of the Roma campaign — that a Netflix-distributed film could be a serious Best Picture contender — has shaped almost every subsequent prestige film production. The streaming platforms now routinely finance films at scales that the traditional studios will no longer touch. The broader implications are the subject of our essay on streaming vs theatrical.