Do we like Alfonso Cuarón?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record and real advocacy for domestic workers and migrants, but the search turned up little on LGBTQ+ or climate topics either way.
Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961, one of four kids in a comfortably middle-class family until his parents separated in the early 1970s. He was close to his nanny, and by twelve he was already filming everything in sight. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were reportedly expelled from film school before finishing.
The career arc is a ripper: Sólo con tu pareja in 1991, a Hollywood stint with A Little Princess, then Y tu mamá también with his brother Carlos in 2001. After that came Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men. Gravity made him the first Latino to win the best director Oscar, and Roma, about his own childhood, won him a second.
On Gaza, he was one of 99 celebrities who signed a 2023 open letter asking President Biden to call for a ceasefire and for hostages to be released. Where you land on that depends on how you read ceasefire calls, but the letter itself also asked for the Israeli hostages to be freed. I found nothing from him either way on trans rights or climate, and that is the honest gap in the file.
The good stuff is real. After Roma, which he dedicated to his childhood nanny, he recorded a public service announcement for the National Domestic Workers Alliance backing fair hiring practices. He pushed that cause with the film's attention rather than just collecting trophies.
There is no scandal here. Searches for lawsuits, allegations and court cases turned up nothing against him; he is the one who has warned fans about a scammer impersonating him. In 2019 he also pushed back on a journalist's question about Roma's Netflix release, a spat about cinema rather than conduct.
Lately he is in the news for honours, not rows. At Morelia he took the UNAM Filmoteca medal, said it was the first recognition he had received from the university, and urged young people to look after the film archive.