4/19/2021 0 Comments Alfonso Cuaron Next Film
Cleo, who is indigenous, watches television and goes on vacation with the white family she serves, seemingly erasing the barrier between themuntil she is asked to go fetch tea.The movie, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August and opened in theaters in November ahead of its Netflix debut on Dec.Golden Globes.
Roma is also nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director. Although the movie is not directly about the politics or social issues of the time period, they seep into the narrative, subtly at times, and dramatically, unmistakably, at others. To help provide some of the context for the story, TIME spoke with experts on 20th-century Mexican history about the dominant political and social forces shaping Mexico during the time when Roma takes place. In the 70s, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominated the countrys government, as it had done since its founding in 1929, using a combination of political patronage, repression and electoral fraud to maintain its hold on power. Roma depicts Mexico at a moment when the tensions created by this system had nearly reached a breaking point. One of the legacies of the PRI was the so-called Dirty War against insurgents in rural Mexico during the 1960s and 70s. According to an official report leaked in 2006, Mexican government soldiers carried out a host of atrocities during the campaign, perpetrating massacres, rapes and the destruction of entire villages in order to destroy both armed and legal opposition. In 1968, as youth movements broke out in the United States and around the world, Mexico City experienced a summer of street protests against government repression. On Oct. 2, thousands of students gathered in the Three Cultures Square in Mexico Citys Tlatelolco housing complex. During the meeting, government snipers positioned on rooftops opened fire, and as chaos took hold, soldiers positioned on the edge of the plaza began to fire into the crowds of students, killing dozens in what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre. As the family drama unfolds, tensions within the city begin to boil. Campaign posters and signs touting the PRI appear in several scenes, while Fermn (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) a young man whom Cleo dates, is shown training with several hundred young men as part of a secretive paramilitary force. ![]() Armed with knives and bamboo sticks, the thugs killed dozens of demonstrators, and the clash sent shockwaves throughout the country. Violence happens a lot in the countrysideit was very much a case of out of sight, out of mind, which was also helped by tight control of the Mexican national press, says Gillingham. The Corpus Christi Massacre and the Tlatelolco massacre that preceded it broke this basic rule. The government crushed insurrections everywhere, and out of the disappeared people for political reasons emerged the modern human rights movement that was fundamental in the eroding of the legitimacy of the political system. Only in 2000 was the PRIs presidential candidate defeated, by the countrys 55th president, Vicente Fox, ending the partys 71-year period of political domination. In the film, when the family takes a trip out of Mexico City, they find that their landowner friends have been in conflict with their tenants, who have apparently killed their dog. In the early 1900s and before, many villagers land was illegally confiscated by plantation owners, reducing farmers to serfdom. An important tenet of the PRI government was the restoration of these lands through breaking up plantations, a goal that was carried out sporadically through the decades. For many, the massacres in Mexico City exposed the government for the near-authoritarian system it was. Corpus Christi is the confirmation of the damage done in 68, says Gillingham. In nearby Cuba, Fidel Castro had recently led a dramatic communist revolution, overthrowing the authoritarian government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and inspiring other poor populations to take up arms. And so the effect of this is that through the 1960s you have increased peasant occupations of land, radicalism and army responses putting down peasant protests.
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