Two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has shown he can handle both appealing indie fare and commercial genre pictures with a confident hand and remarkable vision. A rare talent in the industry, Cuarón could have stuck with films like his Oscar-nominated Mexican road-trip romance Y Tu Mamá También, but he shifted gears with the stunningly original popular adaptation Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the sci-fi neo-classic Children of Men. Now, Cuarón looks to branch out yet again with his first Netflix feature, ROMA.

ROMA, Cuarón's first film in five years, 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. Filmed in luminous black and white, as revealed in the film's first teaser trailer, 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 is the NYFF's opening night centerpiece film, will be a special presentation at TIFF, and will arrive in an awards-qualifying limited theatrical run later this year before debuting on Netflix.

Check out the first teaser trailer for ROMA below:

Time and Space constrain us, but they also define who we are, creating inexplicable bonds with the others that flow with us at the same time and through the same places. ROMA

Here's the official synopsis:

A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, ROMA follows a young domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma.  Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), 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.

roma-alfonso-cuaron
Image via Netflix