Roma does not tell you how to feel. It places you inside a year: 1970-71 Mexico City, the Colonia Roma neighborhood, the Calderon family home, and the life of Cleo, their live-in housekeeper. Cuaron shoots in luminous black-and-white on 65mm, then follows characters through sprawling long takes as if the camera were simply present, not directing your attention anywhere in particular. What a fan of Roma chases is that quality of immersive, unhurried intimacy: a film that treats domestic life as worthy of the fullest cinematic attention, that holds grief and tenderness in the same frame without resolving the tension between them.
Essential Roma: Cuaron's Own Films
The director's body of work, from intimate drama to grand spectacle, all carrying his signature sustained attention
The Same Stillness: Films That Watch Rather Than Rush
Movies that trust silence, long takes, and the accumulation of small moments to carry their emotional weight
Latin American Memory on Screen
Films and series rooted in place, family, and the political currents that run beneath ordinary life in Latin America
Domestic Worlds: Novels That Live Inside the House
Books that find the whole world inside one household, one street, one extended family
Series With Roma's Intimacy and Weight
Television that takes its time and finds political or social history alive inside personal and family stories
Games That Carry That Same Quiet Grief
Games built around emotional observation, memory, and the texture of lived experience rather than action
The Film That Proved Memory Is a Political Act
Roma is Cuaron's autobiographical memory: Cleo is based on Libo, the woman who raised him. But the film refuses to make her a supporting character in someone else's story. It gives her the frame. That choice carries a political charge: whose labor holds a household together, whose grief goes unrecorded by history. The Corpus Christi massacre of June 10, 1971 enters the film not as a history lesson but as a scene Cleo walks through, carrying her own catastrophe alongside the city's.
Black-and-White Is Not Nostalgia Here
Directors reach for monochrome when they want to say: this is memory, this is the past, this is art-with-a-capital-A. Cuaron does something harder. He uses black-and-white to strip away the distraction of color so you actually see: the grain of a concrete wall, the way water moves, a face you might otherwise glance past. The cinematography, which Cuaron shot himself, won the Oscar not because it looked beautiful but because it looked true.
A Year in the Life: Roma's World
- 1968The Tlatelolco massacre shapes a generation of Mexican political consciousness
- 1970The year Roma begins: Mexico City, the Calderon household
- 1971Corpus Christi massacre, June 10: paramilitary violence against student demonstrators
- 1995Cuaron makes A Little Princess, his first major studio film in the United States
- 2001Y Tu Mama Tambien establishes him as a major voice in world cinema
- 2006Children of Men cements his ability to hold political catastrophe in a personal frame
- 2018Roma premieres at Venice, wins the Golden Lion; Netflix releases it globally
We are alone. No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone.Cleo, Roma (2018)
Cleo Is the Film's Center, Not Its Background
When Roma was released, some critics read it as Cuaron's tribute to the woman who raised him, which is true and also incomplete. Cleo is not there to illuminate the Calderon family's story. The Calderon family is there to illuminate the world Cleo moves through. Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actor who had been studying to be a teacher, carries the film entirely on her stillness and her eyes. The Oscar nomination she received was the first for an indigenous Mexican woman in the Best Actress category.