Alfonso Cuarón Receives IndieWire Honors Vanguard Award

Alfonso Cuarón, director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was selected to receive this year’s Vanguard Award for his work on the Netflix drama Roma. The award was presented at the second annual IndieWire Honors held on November 1, 2018. The Vanguard Award honors an individual whose work in independent entertainment stood out above the rest.

The two-time Oscar winner produced, edited, and served as cinematographer on the film, which is based on his own coming-of-age story growing up in Mexico City. The main character of the film is modeled after Cuarón’s own childhood nanny and is played by Yalitza Aparicio. The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the Golden Lion award for best film. Executive editor and chief critic Eric Kohn at IndieWire offered high praise for his work.

Alfonso Cuarón’s first project in his native Mexico since Y Tu Mamá También, Roma has more in common with that movie’s character-based storytelling than any of the bigger productions he’s made since; it also exhibits a mastery unique to his command of the medium. The bittersweet tale of a housemaid in a middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City in the early ’70s, Roma channels Cuarón’s memories of his upbringing into a ravishing, meditative, black-and-white saga that mines its bittersweet story from the inside out.

Cuarón joins a group of talented previous honorees at the IndieWire Honors that includes Ryan Coogler, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Bill Hader, Natalie Portman, Amandla Stenberg, Charlize Theron, and Constance Wu. If you want to see his latest work, Roma will be available on Netflix and in select theaters on December 14, 2018.