Yahoo News explores the impact of 'Roma' on real-life domestic workers

Over the course of his career, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has transported moviegoers to outer space (Gravity), dystopian futures (Children of Men) and wondrous schools of witchcraft and wizardry (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). For his eighth narrative feature, Roma, the Mexican-born writer/director chose to explore terrain that's closer to home…and won his second Best Director Oscar as a result. Based on the director's own childhood experiences growing up in '70s-era Mexico City, Roma—which received 10 Oscar nominations and won three statues on this year's telecast—tells the story of Cleo (played first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio), a young woman employed as a maid and nanny for a middle-class family. Cleo is modeled directly after the domestic worker who raised the young Cuarón and his siblings, Liboria Rodríguez, or as he affectionately called her from the time he learned to speak, "Libo." Speaking with Variety last year, Rodríguez described the surreality of watching her past translated to the screen. "I never imagined everything I’m living right now, that a film would be based on me." While it tells a very specific story set in an equally specific time and place, Roma nevertheless illustrates universal experiences shared by contemporary domestic workers. To drive home the connection between Cuarón's past and our present, one of the production companies behind Roma, Participant Media, partnered with the National Domestic Workers Alliance for a campaign designed to highlight the stories of the 70 million real-life Cleos employed in homes around the world as cleaners and caregivers. For a Yahoo News story, Through Her Eyes host Zainab Salbi and director/producer Samantha Feltus profiled one such domestic worker, currently employed by a New York City family.