Roma

Joaquín, a novelist in his sixties, sits down to tell his life and goes back into his past: the years of his youth in Buenos Aires, the friends he lost, the first loves, the turbulent politics of the country. There is one person at the centre of the telling: his mother, Roma. She gave piano lessons, and it was she who made a writer of her son. Adolfo Aristarain's film runs over two and a half hours and is taken to be largely autobiographical. It moves back and forth constantly between the present and the past. The telling does not fall into nostalgia: the years remembered are warm and hard both, and the friendships loyal and treacherous both. Susú Pecoraro plays the mother and Juan Diego Botto the young Joaquín.