Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón first burst onto the international stage in 2001 with Y Tu Mamá También, a coming-of-age film about two young Mexican boys from different classes. Played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the pair embark on a road trip with a mysterious woman in her twenties – who they are both in love with. Together the three go in search of a fabled beach, la boca del cielo (the mouth of heaven), and the trip transforms their lives forever. It is also a depiction of Mexico at the turn of the 21st century, with all it’s contradictions and undeniable beauty. With it, too, began the cult of Cuarón, who gained a growing legion of fans in Mexico and around the world.
Seventeen years and a raft of films – including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men and Gravity, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2014 – later, he brings us Roma. The tale of Cleo, the live-in housekeeper of a middle-class family in Mexico City’s Roma neighbourhood, the film is set in the 1970s, a troubled time that was marked by deep social unrest.
“This film is nothing like what I’ve done before,” the director tells us from Berlin. “It is the first film where I decided to be absolutely free.”
Roma is semi-autobiographical. The main character, played by Yalitza Aparicio (who was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar) is based on Cuarón’s own nanny, Liboria “Libo” Rodríguez. Speaking to CNN, Cuarón said she was one of the people he most loved. The film pays homage to her life, as well as portraying the enduring class wars and racism that have marked Mexican society and culture, and opening up the debate on how domestic workers are treated in the country.
Cuarón cites a long list of mentors – American film director Sydney Pollack, Mexican film directors José Luis García Agraz and Luis Mandoki – but his colleagues and compatriots Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro have been the most important. “We’ve been each other’s mentors, friends over all these years,” he says, referring to the open dialogue they have about the nature and purpose of contemporary film.
Together the three have overcome every barrier to earn a top spot in the industry. González Iñárritu won the Best Director award two years in a row – in 2015 for Birdman and 2016 for The Revenant – while del Toro took home the Best Picture and Best Director statues in 2018 for The Shape of Water.
On Sunday February 24, 2019, Cuarón made history by winning the Best Director award for Roma. It was his second time taking the accolade, but more importantly, the first time ever that a film of Latin American origin, in Spanish and Mixteco (an indigenous tongue of Mexico), has won the top prize. Beyond historic, it also meant a vindicating win for a film exploring systemic racism, as Donald Trump relentlessly continues to try to gather funds to build a wall between Mexico and the USA.
Despite having 17 films to his name, Cuarón isn’t one to bounce from one project into the next. After the success of Y Tu Mamá También, he settled outside of Mexico, working to create the films he wanted on his own terms. “I don’t think adapting to the industry is necessarily a good thing,” he says. “For me it is about survival. I admire the directors who have decided to go against the grain and follow their own rules. I’ve done that too, in ways... I wouldn’t want to work a film that wasn’t mine.”
Produced by Netflix, Roma’s treatment restarted the debate begun by Pedro Almodóvar at the 70th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, when he suggested cinema needed to be experienced on the big screen. “While I'm alive, I will be fighting for the one thing the new generation is not aware of – the capacity of hypnosis of a large screen for a viewer,” he said at the time. Roma was first shown at independent cinemas in Mexico on December 14, 2018, long before arriving to the live-streaming service. Truth be told, it is only on a big screen that Cuarón‘s cinematography and outstanding sound mix can be truly appreciated.
“It is incredible the cultural relevance cinema and films held in the past, not just as a medium, not for the Oscars or any other awards or events – films were part of people’s discussions,” says Cuarón. “They watched Hollywood films, but also Bergman, Visconti, Pasolini... There was more diversity [back then]. I’ve been sad about the future of film before, but now I feel like it will prevail, we’re just in a transition period.”
Technology has had a profound role in the evolution of the film industry, but Cuarón maintains that the tools with which you tell a story remain unchanged – despite having won Best Visual Effects for Gravity. “What prevails in my films are the principles of storytelling, not technology. I’m not a technological person... It can come and go, but what ultimately matters is life. Technology is only a medium that converges with life, nothing more.”
Despite international acclaim, Cuarón says he feels like part of the minority, working towards greater representation and inclusion in the industry. “Women started this movement and we owe it to them to continue with this important work and change the film industry for the better.”
Cuarón’s voice joined those of del Toro and “Chivo” Lubezki as they decried the Academy’s decision to name the winners of the Best Photography, Best Editing, Best Short Film and Best Makeup and Hairstyling during commercial breaks at Sunday’s upcoming awards. “The films that are nominated for the Academy Awards are the ones that are most widely seen today, but it just makes me think about the rest of the films that don’t make the Academy happy; the more challenging films that don’t fit into the narrative of the industry or wider market. For example, Mexican director Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (La Región Salvaje), which won him the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival in 2016. The film had to wait two years to be distributed in Mexico. And there’s so many other films that have been affected by the same hegemony that impacts on distribution.”
“Roma is, in every sense, a mural, a huge fresco,” says del Toro, a racial and class-based drama that is a very Mexican reality. It is also a project through which Cuarón has been able to express himself as never before. “We don’t make films to survive," he says. "We make them to prevail, to express ourselves and be free."
