Roma

    Movie Poster
    Release year
    2018
    Director
    Alfonso Cuarón Orozco
    Biography of director(s)
    Alfonso Cuarón Orozco was born in Mexico City in 1961. He studied film at UNAM and started his career working in Mexican television and as an assistant director. Later, he directed films such as Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men, Gravity, and Roma. He is known for using long shots and paying a lot of attention to the space around his characters. His movies often focus on family, memory, and social issues. He has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice, including for Roma, which was also inspired partly by his own childhood in Mexico City.
    Country
    Mexico / United States (co-production)
    Original synopsis of the film

    Roma follows Cleo, a young domestic worker who lives with a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. Most of her daily life is spent cleaning the house, taking care of the children, and helping Sofia, the mother of the family. At the same time, the family begins having problems after the father, Antonio, slowly disappears from their lives. Cleo also finds out that she is pregnant after dating Fermin, but he leaves her when he learns about the pregnancy.

    As Cleo deals with her own problems, political violence is happening around her in Mexico City. During the Corpus Christi massacre, she unexpectedly sees Fermin again, connecting her personal situation to the violence outside the family home. Later, Cleo goes through a serious personal loss. Near the end of the film, she travels with Sofia and the children to the beach. When two children get caught in the ocean, Cleo saves them even though she cannot swim. Afterward, she admits that she did not want her baby to be born. The family comforts her and returns home changed, but Cleo goes back to her everyday routine, showing that life continues after everything that has happened.

    Film Awards
    Academy Awards (Oscars), 2019: won 3 Oscars — Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón), Best Cinematography, and Best Foreign Language Film. It received 10 Oscar nominations overall, including Best Picture and acting nominations for Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira.
    BAFTA Awards, 2019: won 4 awards — Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Not in the English Language.
    Golden Globe Awards, 2019: won 2 awards — Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language and Best Director. It was also nominated for Best Screenplay.
    Venice International Film Festival, 2018: won the Golden Lion for Best Film, the festival’s top prize.
    Film still
    A black-and-white film still showing a woman seated inside a car with two children resting against her. She looks through the car window while reflections of clouds and the surrounding landscape appear across the glass.
    A black-and-white film still showing a domestic worker washing clothes at a concrete basin on a rooftop in Mexico City. She wears a checkered apron and looks to the side while rooftops and laundry appear in the background.
    A black-and-white film still showing a young woman and man sitting beside each other in a movie theater. They turn toward one another while rows of seats and large decorative columns are visible in the background.

    Describes the setting of a scene in a play or a film. It refers to everything placed on the stage or in front of the camera—including people. In other words, mise en scène is a catch-all for everything that contributes to the visual presentation and overall “look” of a production. When translated from French, it means “placing on stage.”

    Setting
    Props
    Lighting
    Costume
    Hair and Makeup
    Figure Behavior
    Representative Clip

    This is the art of photography and visual storytelling in a motion picture or television show. Cinematography comprises all on-screen visual elements, including lighting, framing, composition, camera motion, camera angles, film selection, lens choices, depth of field, zoom, focus, color, exposure, and filtration. Cinematography sets and supports the overall look and mood of a film’s visual narrative. Each visual element that appears on screen, a.k.a. the mise-en-scène of a film, can serve and enhance the story—so it is the cinematographer’s responsibility to ensure that every element is cohesive and support the story. Filmmakers often choose to spend the majority of their budget on high-quality cinematography to guarantee that the film will look incredible on the big screen.

    Point of View
    Quality
    Framing
    Scale
    Movement

    Editing is the process of putting a film together–the selection and arrangement of shots and scenes. Editing can condense space and time, emphasize separate elements and bring them together, and organize material in such a way that patterns of meaning become apparent. In addition, editing can determine how a film is perceived: for instance, quick, rapid cuts can create a feeling of tension, while a long take can create a more dramatic effect. The first photoplays generally had no cutting, owing to the fact that they were single-reel films; once filming began, you could not stop until the film ran out. (https://filmglossary.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/term/editing/)

    Coherence, Continuity, and Rhythym
    Editing Style
    Transitions
    Match
    Expansion and Compression of Time
    Editing General Comments

    Sound is an integral part in a film. It refers to everything that the audience hears including sound effects, words and music. Sound is used in films for various purposes, including: providing the information to the viewer about the location of the scene, heightening the mood, telling the audience about the characters and advancing the plot. Every person who watches a film realizes that the choice of voices, soundtrack and music present in a film affect the way that the viewer perceives a particular film. As a result, the sound is an important and integral element of the film, one that determines the way that the viewer experiences and understands a film as a visual experience.

    Sound Type

    Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. A narrative can be considered to be the chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space. In order to analyze the narrative of a film, we need to first make the distinction between the plot of the film and the story of the film. This is sometimes referred to as the discourse and story of a film. Narrative may also be called the story thought story mainly refers to the events that describe the narrative.

    Plot Comments
    Story Comments
    Narrator Type
    Narrative Structure

    Film genres are various forms or identifiable types, categories, classifications or groups of films. (Genre comes from the French word meaning "kind," "category," or "type"). These provide a convenient way for scriptwriters and film-makers to produce, cast and structure their narratives within a manageable, well-defined framework. Genres also offer the studios an easily 'marketable' product, and give audiences satisfying, expected and predictable choices. Genres refers to recurring, repeating and similar, familiar or instantly-recognizable patterns, styles, themes, syntax, templates, paradigms, motifs, rules or generic conventions.

    Category