Roma

Arte Abierto, in collaboration with FundarqMx, presents a new edition of Arquicinema, a space where cinema and architecture converge. This edition is titled La Ciudad de México a través del cine.

During four special sessions featuring interdisciplinary talks that explore how architecture shapes cinematic narrative and how, in turn, cinema becomes a tool to observe and understand Mexico City’s urban, social, and landscape environment.

Through the analysis of selected scenes from key films—from the classics of Luis Buñuel to the contemporary gaze of Alfonso Cuarón—specialists in architecture, urban history, and visual culture will reflect on how the city’s built spaces are also narrative, symbolic, and emotional sites.

This series seeks to open an interdisciplinary dialogue and foster exchange on the role of architecture in the cinematic representation of the city.

Arquicinema: La Ciudad de México a través del cine proposes looking at cinema through the lens of architecture, and vice versa, as a way of exploring the connections between built space, urban identity, and the narratives that define us.

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

Set between 1970 and 1971 in Colonia Roma—a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood where households often employed domestic workers, particularly for childcare—the film is a visual testimony of a transforming urban landscape.

Rodrigo Hidalgo analyzes the film as a valuable document of Mexico City’s modern heritage, highlighting its functionalist houses, tree-lined streets, and public spaces not merely as backdrops but as protagonists that reveal the social and urban transformations of the time.

The discussion reflects on how architecture and urban planning operate as spaces of memory and exclusion, where material structures narrate stories of gender, power, and urban segregation—making visible what is often left hidden in the official history of Mexico City.

Rodrigo Hidalgo

Journalist and chronicler of Mexico City, founder of La Ciudad de México en el Tiempo. He has given numerous talks on the capital’s history at venues such as Palacio de Bellas Artes, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Biblioteca Vasconcelos, and CCU Tlatelolco. He has also contributed to exhibitions including Roma-Condesa: 111 años de historia, Centro Histórico, corazón de México (Museo MODO), and Urbanofagia (Galería El Rule). His work has appeared in El Universal, Gatopardo, Récord, and Km Cero, and he has collaborated on books such as Centro Histórico: 200 lugares imprescindibles and Ciudad Independencia. He currently hosts La Ciudad de México en el Tiempo on Canal Once.