Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. The title comes from a middle-class neighborhood, and follows the turbulent lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. Of course, you get none of that with this trailer, which slyly just uses cleaning water to wash over a street, but it’s the new Cuaron! What more do you need?

Cuaron also tells Indiewire that Roma is his most personal project, and was shaped by his own memories:

“Ninety percent of the scenes represented in the film are scenes taken out of my memory,” Cuarón said. “Sometimes directly, sometimes a bit more obliquely. It’s about a moment of time that shaped me, but also a moment of time that shaped a country. It was the beginning of a long transition in Mexico.”

Cuaron also explained why, despite shooting the film in 65mm and using Dolby Atmos sound, they chose to go with Netflix rather than a theatrical-only distribution:

“It has to reach the biggest audience possible,” Cuarón said. “For me, when Netflix made a pitch to us, this film being so intimate for me, I was really concerned with the film not being able to reach as much of an audience as possible. Not even talking commercially, but securing a long life for the film … Now that we’re at the end of July, I’m very grateful so far for the way Netflix is handling it and the passion for the film.”

Check out the teaser trailer for Roma below. The film will play at the Venice Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. It will be released on Netflix and in theaters later this year.

Here’s the official synopsis for Roma:

The most personal project to date from Academy Award®-winning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien), Roma 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.

 

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 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.

 

Filmed in luminous black and white, 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.