VENICE, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) -- Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron's hotly-anticipated movie Roma had its world premiere in competition at the Venice International Film Festival on Thursday, to much audience acclaim.

Distributed by Netflix and shot in black and white, the semi-autobiographical drama shot in a realist style chronicles the life of a middle-class family in a Mexico City neighborhood called Roma in the early 1970s.

The movie is told through the eyes of Cleo, an indigenous live-in nanny and housekeeper, who gets pregnant but is abandoned by her boyfriend, while her employer is abandoned by her husband. The two women forge a bond that keeps the family together.

"Cleo is based on my babysitter when I was young. She became a part of the family," said Cuaron, who explained that the cast, many of whom were non-actors, never saw the script or the rushes during shooting.

Indeed, said Cuaron, the cast saw the finished movie for the first time at Thursday's gala screening.

"It was an unconventional process, which had to do with memory," said Cuaron, who said his choice of wide tracking shots and digital black-and-white had to do with "observing from a distance, without judgment" and also with "respecting the notion of time."

Cuaron, who won Oscars in 2014 for his science fiction thriller Gravity starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, said he wanted to make "a movie that doesn't give you any answers" but rather lets the characters and the events play out in their setting in an organic way.

Also premiering on Thursday in competition for the top prizes at Venice was Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' period drama The Favourite, about two women whose survival is based on winning the attentions of Queen Anne in England in the early 18th century.

The movie pits Oscar-winning actresses Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone against each other as they compete for the attentions of a lonely and invalid queen, played in a powerful performance by British actress Olivia Colman.

The movie is visually sumptuous, featuring beautiful costumes and many sweeping wide-angle shots, the camera roaming dramatically within lavishly designed interiors.

The director, Lanthimos, explained that he was drawn to the screenplay because it explored "three complex female characters, which you rarely see" in the film industry, and that the movie was nine years in the making.

Coming up at the Venice Film Festival are Bradley Cooper's remake of A Star Is Born, starring pop star Lady Gaga in her debut on the silver screen; Peterloo by veteran British director Mike Leigh, who has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Golden Lion in Venice in the past; and the latest offering from the Coen Brothers, a Western starring Liam Neeson and James Franco, called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The Venice Film Festival, now in its 75th edition, runs through Sept. 8.