Roma

Roma (2018) is Alfonso Cuarón's drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. He directed, wrote and shot it himself, in black and white, as a tribute to the woman who raised him.

Mexico City, early 1970s, a neighborhood called Roma. Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is a live-in maid for a middle-class family: she scrubs floors, wakes the kids, folds the laundry, and loves those children as if they were her own. Her employer Sofía (Marina de Tavira) has four kids and a husband who leaves "on business" and never comes home. Cleo carries her own grief too, abandoned by her boyfriend the moment he learns she is pregnant. Two women, cast aside and split by class, lean on each other while a turbulent world churns around them.

Cuarón rebuilt a year of his childhood from memory down to the smallest detail, the street noise, a barking dog, the student killings on Corpus Christi day in the summer of '71 that Cleo watches from a shop window. The film took three Academy Awards, for directing, cinematography and best foreign-language picture, the first Netflix release to do so. Aparicio, who had never acted before, earned a Best Actress nomination. Stream Roma (2018) online on iFILM.