It’s pace is deliberate and gradual and it slowly pulls you in. It relies on your patience and love of realistic story telling. Based on Cuarón’s own personal experience of growing up in a middle class household with a live-in housekeeper, it will make you care about this family unit and it will break your heart.

Things in this Mexican household unfold at a leisurely pace, a lot like things do in real life, and it is left up to you to form your own opinions about the validity of employing someone to do all of your menial tasks. It is not all heavy going however as the humour bubbles to the surface when these ladies are left to their own devices.

Are these jobs giving these women a better life or just taking advantage of their poverty and lack of opportunities? There is love for these ladies in the household, especially from the young children but their ability to advance seems implausible at best. It is a personal story and asks you to form your own opinions.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/ROMACuaron

The most personal project to date from director and writer Alfonso Cuarón, ROMA chronicles a turbulent year in the lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. Cuarón, inspired by the women from his childhood, delivers an artful ode to the matriarchy that shaped his world.

A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, ROMA follows a young domestic worker Cleo from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela, also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma.

Mother of four, Sofia, 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.

Filmed in luminous black and white, ROMA is an intimate, gut-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the ways, small and large, one family maintains its balance in a time of personal, social and political strife.

ROMA at Dendy Cooparoo
7 December 2018
Dendy Cooparoo, Brisbane
www.dendy.com.au