Roma(2018)
dir. Alfonso Cuarón
The household runs on someone you don't see.
Where to watch: Streaming on NetflixLetterboxd ↗
Mexico City, 1970-71. Cleo is a live-in domestic worker for a middle-class family whose father is walking out; she's also pregnant and abandoned, moving through a city on the edge of state violence. Cuarón shot it in black and white from his own childhood memories and the woman who raised him, letting the camera linger on the labor that holds a household up and gets no credit.
Why it’s here
The film is built on the argument that the people who keep a house running are the ones the house doesn't see. What's punk is its refusal to put the family's drama at the center and its quiet insistence on the nanny's. What's pedagogical is how class, race and gender sit in the same frame without commentary, and how a political massacre in the street is just part of a Tuesday for the people living through it.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- Mexico
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
2666
Roberto Bolaño
Eight hundred pages on what the world ignores.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Always Running
Luis Rodriguez
La vida loca and the cost of surviving it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Amuleto
Roberto Bolaño
Locked in a bathroom while history happened.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
El Paso, 1987. Two boys. The secrets take all summer.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldúa
The border isn't a line. It's a wound that won't scar.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Caramelo
Sandra Cisneros
Every summer to Mexico. They always bring the past.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Cemetery Boys
Aiden Thomas
He summoned a ghost to prove himself. The ghost won't leave.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Children of the Land
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
He grew up undocumented. His parents were deported. He stayed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST