Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón won two Golden Globe awards last night for his black-and-white film Roma.
Cuarón took the best director award for his Netflix-produced homage to his childhood nanny, his second Golden Globe in the category after his 2013 win for his science fiction space film Gravity.
Roma, set in the Mexico City neighborhood of the same name, also won the Golden Globe for best foreign film.
“. . . I feel a little bit like [I’m] cheating . . . accepting this award because most of what I was doing was just to witness and enjoy the amazing Marina de Tavira and Yalitza Aparicio just exist on the screen and I’m eternally grateful with the two of them,” the director said after accepting the best director award at the 76th Golden Globes ceremony in Los Angeles.
“Another part of me is telling me that in reality this film was directed by [my childhood nanny] Libo [played by Aparicio as Cleo], by my mother [played by de Tavira] and family and maybe even more importantly by this place, this very complex lab that shaped and created me, so muchas gracias México,” Cuarón continued.
The 57-year-old director later told Golden Globe organizers, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that Roma was the first film that he made “without any fear,” adding that he was “willing to risk absolutely everything.”
Cuarón, who lives in London, said that returning to Mexico to make the movie was “amazing but very complex.”
He explained: “I was doing a film about my past and I was visiting a place that, in many ways, was charged with the past. You know, it was sometimes very complex to conciliate [reconcile] that past with my present.”
Cuarón and his team painstakingly recreated his family’s home as it was in the early 1970s and also filmed on the street where it is located.
“I couldn’t imagine the impact that it would have on me and my family. They came to visit the set and had the same reaction as me . . . It was our house,” he said.
The director said that he was “immensely surprised” that Roma was even nominated for the categories it won.
“. . . This is a very unlikely film . . . It’s a black-and-white film in Spanish . . . It’s not the most likely film to go into the awareness of the mainstream . . .” Cuarón said.
Asked why he thought that Roma had “touched so many people,” Cuarón responded, “I guess that it’s clear that the human experience is one and the same and also there is a craving now for diversity: diversity in terms of stories, diversity in the characters that portray those stories but [just] as important, diversity in the ways and shapes of cinema.”
Aparicio, a 26-year-old Mixtec teacher from Oaxaca who stars in the film and has received widespread acclaim for her performance, attended last night’s awards ceremony although she was not nominated in the best actress category.
However, she has been touted as a potential nominee and even winner of an Oscar.
Roma is considered a frontrunner for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, which will be held late next month, and Cuarón, who started film studies in Mexico but never completed his course, will likely be nominated in the best director category.
Along with Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro, he is one of the so-called three amigos of Mexican cinema.
Between them, the men have won four of the last five Oscars for best director.
Source: AFP (sp)
