Mexican filmmaker heads to Cannes
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‘Roma,’ a short film by the Mexican filmmaker Elisa Miller, is to represent Mexico in Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique this year, an international critics week that runs at the same time as the larger film festival in Cannes.
Miller won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize in the short film category in 2007 for ‘Ver llover’ (‘Watching it Rain’), which was filmed in Yautepec, Morelos.
‘Roma’ is one of four Mexican shorts that garnered awards at the Morelia Film Festival last year, writes the News.
‘Roma’ -- clocking in at just 23 minutes and shot in just three days on a Super 16 camera -- is the thesis project of the young filmmaker. She calls it an intimate, introspective story. In it, a young woman migrates north and has to stop in the Roma soap factory to evade authorities, clean herself up and keep going.
She said her work focused on the fight for gender equality that women have waged to win a more egalitarian society. Miller said that progress had been steady but slow in Mexico: The country celebrated its first Feminist Congress in 1915 and women still have very limited participation in politics.
Miller said that ‘Roma’ has many parallels with the history of women’s rights battles. (The News).
--Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Elisa Miller. Credit: Cannes Film Festival website