To commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, the Appell Center has collaborated with prominent York County community members to curate an exclusive film series. Each feature portrays the struggles, triumphs and challenges faced by notable individuals in significant periods of time. They are stories that simply must be told and retold… stories that continue to influence those that experience them.

Each film screening will open with remarks by its curator, detailing why they think the movie should be shared with the York community, and how it has significantly impacted their lives.

Roma
With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuarón recreated the early-1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family through the experiences of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, in a revelatory screen debut), the indigenous domestic worker who keeps the household running. Charged with the care of four small children abandoned by their father, Cleo tends to the family even as her own life is shaken by personal and political upheavals.

Written, directed, shot, and coedited by Cuarón, Roma is a labor of love with few parallels in the history of cinema, deploying monumental black-and-white cinematography, an immersive soundtrack, and a mixture of professional and nonprofessional performances to shape its author’s memories into a world of enveloping texture, and to pay tribute to the woman who nurtured him.