Alfonso Cuarón: Observe the Moments
Picture your childhood home. How well do you remember it? The colour of the front door. The pictures on the walls. The shape of the kitchen; the way it used to smell in the morning. Every corner, cupboard and creaking floorboard. The view out of your bedroom window. The people inside. From an early age we instinctively take mental snapshots of our surroundings, yet it is a simple fact of life that even the most familiar and seemingly indelible memories fade. However hard we may try and fight it, the mind’s eye loses focus over time.
Roma, the eighth feature from Alfonso Cuarón, is an attempt to recall the past with perfect fidelity. Set in Mexico City in the early 1970s, it is a living scrapbook of the writer/director’s own youth – a meticulous recreation of the eponymous neighbourhood as it once looked. Asked whether he regards the film as his most personal, Cuarón pauses before breaking into a broad smile. “This is as personal as I can go, in the sense that 90 per cent of the scenes came from my memory. The idea of capturing memory is what dictated the whole process.”
Acting as his own cinematographer for the first time in
