Roma

Alfonso Cuarón shot Roma in black-and-white, in 65mm, with a camera that glides rather than cuts, and the effect is almost the opposite of what monochrome usually signals: instead of distancing the past, the clarity of every frame makes 1970s Mexico City feel more present than color could. This is a memory being handled like an artifact, not softened by nostalgia but preserved at full resolution.

The film follows a live-in domestic worker for a middle-class family through a year that includes a pregnancy, an abandonment, a student massacre glimpsed from a furniture store window, and a beach rescue shot in a single unbroken take. Cuarón, working from his own childhood memories, resists making her interiority legible through dialogue; instead the camera simply stays with her until her exhaustion and her tenderness both become impossible to miss.

What Roma ultimately insists on is a redistribution of narrative attention — the woman who is usually background detail in a story about a family's crisis is handed the whole frame, and the family's crises become, correctly, secondary to hers.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial