The second day opens with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, a touchstone of contemporary cinema. Set in 1970s Mexico City, the film is celebrated for uniting painstaking historical reconstruction with discreet digital augmentation. It demonstrates how technology can deepen, rather than dilute, cinematic realism.
For participants, Roma becomes a living case study of how memory and digital technique can collaborate to create richly textured worlds, providing a point of departure for discussing how emerging technologies transform the art and practice of production design.
After the screening, another panel examines the creative synthesis of physical and digital space in Roma.
Panelists: Oscar Tello (art director), Carlos Morales (post-production specialist), and Gabriel Cortés (set designer). Moderator: Francisco Rivera.
Their conversation highlights how domestic and urban settings become vehicles for memory and collective history, and how digital compositing can invisibly extend these environments. The panel maps out a future in which production design is inseparable from advanced visual effects, offering concrete insights for designers who wish to expand narrative possibility while maintaining authentic visual language.
Additional event organisation by: Elva Yanuaria Algravez Espinoza, Jaime García Estrada, and Felipe Herrera Lozano
About the Organizer:
The Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas (ENAC–UNAM) is Mexico’s national film school and one of the most respected centers for cinematic education in Latin America. Founded in 1963 as the CUEC and now part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), ENAC trains filmmakers and audiovisual artists across all major disciplines. It is the only institution in Mexico that offers Production Design as a formal field of study within its Bachelor’s Degree in Cinematography, highlighting the creative and theoretical role of space, set construction, and visual worlds in cinematic storytelling.
