Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's much touted Netflix production Roma, screened out of competition at the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF, 20-29 November), is a 135-min, black-and-white depiction of an upper middle-class family's life in early 1970s Mexico City that focuses on the domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). Cuarón's last film, Gravity (2013), starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, was a Hollywood hit and won numerous awards around the world. This time, against the backdrop of the 1971 student protests, he offers a deep social-political analysis of Mexico's gruelling class structure through Cleo's interactions with Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her husband Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), their four children and dog. Written and edited as well as directed by Cuarón, the film – which won the Golden Lion and SIGNIS awards at the Venice Film Festival – is set in a neighbourhood named Roma, and it proves gripping from the very first moment, when a plane is seen reflected on the the stone-patterned floor of the courtyard being washed. The family's excessive wealth is visually clarified with shots of the empty house before it is filled and Antonio's repeated attempts to park his music- and cigarette smoke-filled Ford Galaxy in the small garage. It's a cosy family atmosphere until Antonio complains that the house hasn't been cleaned properly and an argument erupts with Sofia. Meanwhile Cleo is enjoying her time with her boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), who demonstrates his martial arts moves in the nude and watches a World War II film with her before – to his evident terror – she tells him she is pregnant with his child. Antonio is absent while Sofia takes Cleo for a pregnancy test, he says he is away on business but even before Cleo spots him with his new lover it is clear this is what is happening. A kind of surreal climax takes place on Christmas Eve, when a fire breaks out in the garden during an extravagant party with rich people in ridiculous outfits while Cleo is eating with other domestic workers. Another – tragic – one takes place when Cleo gives birth to stillborn while locked up in a shop during violent protests. But perhaps the dramatic climax is the long take shot by Cuarón in person at sea during an outing at the beach in which Sofia informs the children that she and their father have separated and also Cleo ends up saving their lives. It seals a powerful if occasionally verbose artistic vision of an era that benefits from powerful cinematography.
*** Studio Misr Egyptian filmmaker Mona Asaad's documentary Studio Misr, screened in the Special Screenings section of the festival, is among the most effective audiovisual documents of social change in Egypt, in which the story of a filmmaking space since the 1930s becomes a model of the story of Egypt. This is the history of Studio Misr, the oldest and best known cinematic studio in Egypt, which produced a huge number of films in the 1930s and 1940s, founded by the nationalist economist Talaat Harb alongside Bank Misr. After it was nationalised in the 1960s the studio fell into relative disuse until a team of filmmakers led by director and producer Karim Gamal Eddine (founded in 1988 under the name Al-Axir) decided to rent and thereby rescue the studio from the clutches of the bureaucracy. Asaad was a member of the group that negotiated this project with the government and eventually implemented it, and the present work is her record of the endeavour's various stages. Asaad begins with the history of the space, when it was founded in 1935 and opened new horizons for cinema in Egypt with German filmmaker Fritz Krump's Wedad starring Um Kulthoum, and she deals with the glory days during which it introduced such filmmakers as Salah Abu-Seif, Kamal Selim and Kamal Al-Sheikh, in 1935-1960. She then deals with the studio's nationalisation, the start of a downward spiral through which it lost its prestige and edge – until in 2000 Gamal Eddine managed to rent it for 20 years, paying the state LE45 million. Mixing archival footage with interviews, the film features figures of great expertise including the late critic Samir Farid and the studio's general manager producer Ali Murad, who explains how he advised Gamal Eddine against the project and describes the state of deterioration in which the studio was, which was so terrible Al-Axir had to take the studio's previous administration to court. Out of 17 feddans, for example, Al-Axir could only use eight, the rest having been used illegally for farming; the official estimate for the lab's value was LE700 thousand, while independent experts valued it at LE2500. But the most shocking of all was the state of the building housing 4000 Egyptian film negatives, and naturally the state of the negatives themselves, were found. Aside from the many and various ironies that make much of the film genuinely funny, the renovation and rehabilitation process drained the team so much that one bright member, Hatem, ended up emigrating to New Zealand. Since 2000 Studio Misr has produced such commercial films as Sherif Arafa's Al-Nadher (The Principle, 2000), Mohamed Abu-Seif's Al-Naama wal Tawous (The Ostrich and the Peacock, 2001), Ali Idris's Harim Karim (Karim's Women, 2005) and Mohamed Yassin's Damm Al-Ghazal (Gazelle Blood, 2005) as well as Tahani Rashed's art house documentaries Giran (Neighbours, 2009) and Al-Banat Dol (These Girls, 2006), among many others.
