Alfonso Cuarón has finished filming his follow-up to Gravity and revealed details on the production at a press conference.
Written and directed by Cuarón, the film will be titled Roma and will portray the 1971 Corpus Christi Massacre where a paramilitary group known as the Halcones attacked a student protest over a slashed budget in a Mexico City. The death toll was never officially announced, but is estimated that about 50 were killed and dozens or even as many as 200 were wounded. Previously all that was known about Cuaron’s next feature was that it would take place over a year in the life of a middle-class family in the early 1970s in Mexico City.
Cuarón and production designer Eugenio Caballero filmed at the scene and had to close down streets in the process.
“We weren’t thinking about this frivolously,” Cuarón said. “We did this to re-create a historic moment in Mexicans’ consciousness…For that very reason it was essential to film this scene where the events happened.”
“By the nature of the project, being a period film, we had to close streets,” Caballero said. “In addition to the support from the authorities, the people understood what the project was about and it was interesting to talk about that city for which many people were stirred by nostalgia.”
The movie was also apparently shot on 70mm by cinematographer Galo Olivares, replacing Cuarón’s usual cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki who couldn’t film due to a scheduling conflict, according to The Playlist.
Cuarón’s most recent film was the Sandra Bullock sci-fi thriller Gravity. Before that it was the dystopian thriller Children of Men and the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Thank you to Filmeweb and Crossroads Today for the help.
