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Roma



With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuarón recreated the early-1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family through the experiences of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, in a revelatory screen debut), the indigenous domestic worker who keeps the household running. Charged with the care of four small children abandoned by their father, Cleo tends to the family even as her own life is shaken by personal and political upheavals. Written, directed, shot, and coedited by Cuarón, Roma is a labor of love with few parallels in the history of cinema, deploying monumental black-and-white cinematography, an immersive soundtrack, and a mixture of professional and nonprofessional performances to shape its author's memories into a world of enveloping texture, and to pay tribute to the woman who nurtured him.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 4K digital master, supervised by director Alfonso Cuarón, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Road to "Roma," a new documentary about the making of the film, featuring behind-the-scenes footage and an interview with Cuarón
• Snapshots from the Set, a new documentary featuring actors Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, producers Gabriela Rodríguez and Nicolás Celis, production designer Eugenio Caballero, casting director Luis Rosales, executive producer David Linde, and others
• New documentaries about the film's sound and postproduction processes, featuring Cuarón; Sergio Diaz, Skip Lievsay, and Craig Henighan from the postproduction sound team; editor Adam Gough; postproduction supervisor Carlos Morales; and finishing artist Steven J. Scott
• New documentary about the film's ambitious theatrical campaign and social impact in Mexico, featuring Celis and Rodríguez
• Nothing at Stake, a new video essay by filmmaker :: kogonada
• Trailers
• Alternate French subtitles and Spanish SDH for the film
• PLUS: Essays by novelist Valeria Luiselli and historian Enrique Krauze, along with (Blu-ray only) writing by author Aurelio Asiain and production-design images with notes by Caballero

FrauBlucher wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2016 10:28 am Alfonso Cuaron new film will be a drama about a Mexican middle class family.

Cuaron's follow up to Gravity is Roma, a Mexico-set historical drama about the Corpus Christi Massacre. It stars mostly unknowns and was shot in 70mm

He mentioned this (unnamed at that time) project on Charlie Rose in 2006 for the Mexican Filmmakers roundtable discussion which suggests to me this has been a personal passion project.

I believe this will only be his second feature without Emmanuel Lubezki

Colonia Roma, my fav. in Mexico city, is now a white UPPER middle class ghetto.
Is it in Spanish?

I believe so

Article and video.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/05/roma-a ... 201816955/

Sounds terrific. Kind of rotten though that Netflix is distributing the film.

Well, I'm glad most people will be able to see the film, while at the same time I will be hoping my local independent theater gets a 70mm print.

I wonder how they're going to go about making 70mm prints. Kodak only makes one black and white print stock, and only for 16mm and 35mm projection. It's generally best to print black and white on black and white, as printing black and white to color print stock can introduce color casts.

Teaser.

They almost definitely won't bother with 70mm prints. It was shot digitally with the Alexa 65, which has been widely misreported.

Oh, haha, so they shot with an Alexa65 and reporters heard 65 and thought it meant 65mm?

That's pretty funny.

I am excited about the cinematography for this film, regardless. Just to see Cuaron break free from the style he had with "Chivo" as he calls Lubezki and return to his early roots as a camera operator/cinematographer and also for the collaboration with Galo Olivares, who has done some striking work on short films as well as El Vigilante.

Here's his portfolio site:

https://galoolivares.com

I particularly liked his work on La rabia de Clara.

Okay, so I reread the Indiewire article and there is actually a parenthetical about how it was shot digitally on the Alexa 65 that I guess I missed. There were a couple other points in the article where they say "shot on 65mm" that had me thinking they meant on 65mm film.

I'm excited to see what Cuaron and Olivares can do with the Alexa 65, though. I don't think that camera has really been used to its potential yet in a narrative film like this.

Trailer.

Wow

I'm going to be fucking pissed if this won't be screened anywhere near me

I was hoping for slightly deeper blacks in the photography but other than that (and that might be a product of me watching this on my work computer as much as anything), this looks so good.

Something about a gifted technician like Alfonso Cuaron going for a kind of heightened neorealism in a story that plugs into experiences from his youth... it's just too darn appealing.

Yeah, I have a bad feeling it would take quite a trip for me to see this in theaters, but it's what I'm most excited for this year.

Poster:

Give me the prize for most obvious post of the year, but jeez ... why is such a seemingly visual film getting largely a TV-only release?

It's a Netflix world, that's why.

(Well, except in my house, I've never been a subscriber.)

Even though it is Cuaron I really question how wide a release it would have ever gotten (in the US, at least) without Netflix. Very personal film, B&W, Spanish language...

To me I really think Netflix is picking up the slack from the studios and taking the chances that they aren't willing to take while providing a distribution model that can reach a wide audience that the smaller studios lack (unless their movie ends up on Netflix or Hulu or whatever, ha).

Would I much rather see Roma on the big screen? Obviously. And I will hope that my city happens to have one of the "select theaters." But I'm thankful to know that if nothing else I will have easy access to it.

Well, this will be a good test. A small art house film by a big director. Let’s see how this plays out. If the buzz grows will more theaters be added?