Alfonso Cuaron's masterpiece Roma wins Venice Film Festival
Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron won the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday for Roma.
With its highly emotional story centred on an indigenous maid working for a middle-class family in Mexico City in 1971, it has been hailed as Cuaron's most personal film - and also his best.
He told reporters that in an incredible coincidence, "today is the birthday of the woman the movie is based on. What a present!"
Cuaron, 56, reconstructed his own childhood home for the Netflix-backed film, borrowing furniture from relatives to recreate how it was when he was 10.
But the heart of the film is the performance of first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cleo, a young live-in maid of Mixteco heritage who looked after the director as a boy.
"Cleo is based on my babysitter when I was young. We were a family together," Cuaron said.
"But when you grow up with someone you love, you don't discuss their identity. So for this film, I was forced to see myself as this woman, a member of the lower classes, from the indigenous population. This is a point of view I had never had before."
The second prize Silver Lion went to France's Jacques Audiard for his hugely enjoyable Western, The Sisters Brothers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly.
Another Wild West tale, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs by the Coen brothers, won best script. - AFP
Get The New Paper on your phone with the free TNP app. Download from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store now
