Roma - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[brent]

Here is what Guillermo del Toro wrote on Alfonso Cuarón for Variety's 2018 version of annual "Directors on Directors" piece: "All roads lead to 'Roma,' as the saying goes. But the most successful, the most heartening of those roads is the one Alfonso took: after the enormous critical and box office triumph of Gravity (2013), Alfonso was in a perfect position to do whatever he wanted. He could have commanded life-setting paydays to helm any or all superhero stories, he could have decided to work with the biggest stars or tackle a blank-check epic full of color and bombast. And he chose 'Roma.' A black-and-white, minute re-creation of a Mexico that faded, that disappeared after the massive earthquake in 1985 (unnoticed by most, several blocks of the city were re-created, cars, avenues, stores and all on a backlot set built for the film) and the story of an unsung hero in a middle-class family with no great anecdote or particular agency in the large movements of history in Mexico. He chose to make an epic effort to tell an intimate story. He made a conscious effort to tell this story devoid of the trappings of Aristotelian three-act structure but he did so with what is, to date, his most precise, his most breathtaking use of cinema as a language and a medium. He chose wisely. And to me this is the confirmation of his spirit - one that he has demonstrated by going back and doing Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and will do again in the future. In these, our troubled times, he speaks about characters that are invisible and dramas that go unspoken, and thus he provides us with the most urgent of antidotes: empathy."

[fred]

One of two foreign language films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director in the same year, the other being Cold War (2018). This is the first time since 1976 (42 years) in which two out of the five nominees were foreign films; both Seven Beauties (1975) and Face to Face (1976) were nominated for Best Director at the 49th Academy Awards in early 1977. In fact, 1976 and 2018 are the only instances in which two foreign language films were nominated for Best Director in the same year.