A huge tip of the hat to the fine folk at Birth.Movies.Death for alerting me to one of the most beautiful looking teasers for a film I’ve seen in, well, forever. Feast your eyes on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma…

I’m a big fan of the Mexican director’s work, not only has he made one of the stone-cold classics of science-fiction cinema (or indeed, of just cinema) with Children of Men, but he also made one of the only Harry Potter films I can actually recall anything about (and I’ve seen them all, at least I think I have), with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He’s also made excellent movies such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity (which won him Academy Awards for both Best Director and Best Picture).

Co-edited, co-photographed, written, co-produced, and directed by Cuarón, Roma is an autobiographically inspired film that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. And if this powerful and sumptuous trailer is anything to go by, it will be best experienced in a cinema.

Ironic then, that most viewers will probably see it on Netflix as part of an impressive slate of movies the streaming channel has lined up by filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Paul Greengrass and Gareth Evans, along with the insanely tantalising promise of Orson Welles’ legendary The Other Side of the Wind finally being completed. Of course, for viewers without easy access to cinemas that screen more than studio blockbusters, this kind of line up is a godsend.

Here’s the official synopsis for Roma:

“A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, Romafollows a young domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma.  Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), copes with the extended absence of her husband, Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia’s children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators.”

Roma has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, and I hope to bring you more news soon.