‘Gravity’ Director Alfonso Cuaron Has Wrapped Production on His New Film
We’ve known since last fall that Alfonso Cuaron was returning to Mexico to shoot his first movie since the visually stunning Gravity, but we didn’t know too much of what it’ll be about. As of today, production on the film, titled Roma, has wrapped, as Cuaron himself announced in a press conference.
El Universal reports (via The Playlist) that Cuaron thanked Mexico City for allowing him to shoot a few large key sequences there, which involved blocking off main roads and subway stations for a period of time and no doubt causing a ton of traffic. He revealed that he shot in Mexico City because Roma would in part deal with the Corpus Christi Massacre, during which a group of elite Mexican soldiers executed student demonstrators in the streets of the capital city on the day of the Corpus Christi festival in 1971.
Aside from that, the film follows a middle-class family and “will evoke the experiences and essence of the decade of the 1970s in Mexico City,” and that’s about all we know plot-wise. Given that the massacre was such a huge sequence to shoot, we can safely bet that that’ll feature prominently in the story. The cast, with the exception of one member, Mexican actress Marina de Tavira, is mostly newcomers. The film was shot on 70mm, but not by Cuaron’s frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki due to a scheduling conflict. Instead, that job went to Mexican cinematographer Galo Olivares.
We don’t know yet when the movie’s coming out, as Cuaron has only just started the post-production phase and no festival premieres have been announced yet — although this is definitely a film to keep on your festival radar.