It took 16 years for Alfonso Cuarón to take a break from his big-budget Hollywood hustle and head back home to reconnect with the small-scale, intimate filmmaking of his youth. We all remember the last time that happened he ended up bringing the world that beloved touchstone of contemporary Mexican cinema, 2001’s Y tú mamá también. So naturally expectations are equally high for his upcoming feature Roma, which follows a year in the life of a middle-class Mexico City family during the 1970s.
Understandably, Mexicans are overjoyed to have one of their most illustrious fellow countrymen back in his homeland for the production. So overjoyed, in fact, that they’ve received him with open arms, and deadly weapons. Indeed, while shooting a recent scene in the colonia Tabacalera, near the city’s infamous Centro Histórico, the set of Roma received an unwanted visit from a group of armed men dressed as local law enforcement officials.
Cuarón was not on the set at the time, but the perpetrators were probably less interested in a celebrity sighting and more interested in the bounty of laptops, cell phones, and cash money they made off with from unsuspecting crew members. Luckily, the incident was caught on closed-circuit cameras and an official report has been filed with local police while the production doubles down on security at their other locations.
It’s an unfortunate welcome home for the Mexico City-born filmmaker, who has been working primarily out of Hollywood since 1995’s A Little Princess – and it’s precisely the type of indiscriminate violence that inspired his close friend Guillermo del Toro to go into indefinite exile following his own father’s kidnapping. Let’s just hope that after an incident like this, Cuarón doesn’t eventually decide to follow suit.