Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building

The first Mexican film to premiere at Cannes Critics’ Week in two decades is a masterful docu-fiction hybrid navigating queerness and familial crisis.

For Bruno in 1990s Mexico City, life is exuberant. He’s celebrating his 11th birthday with a gender-swap costume party, and he spends many frivolous days – watching porn, acting in the school play, sneaking onto the set of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet – with his best friend and crush Vladimir. But things take a turn when he and his mother receive news that his father has HIV. Thirty years later, Bruno confronts the memories and revelations of this watershed in his childhood.

A film that is, in the director’s words, “not faithful to facts, but to emotional memory”, award-winning documentarian Bruno Santamaría Razo’s fiction debut ingeniously blurs boundaries in both excavating and reimagining the past. Initially born from interviews with family members, the resulting work plays with remembrance and representation, interweaving dramatic recreations with talking-head footage, animation and even educational AIDS videos from the era. Newcomer Jade Reyes is a revelation, playing Santamaría Razo’s younger self with a wide-eyed ebullience that is matched by Fernando Hernández García’s warm, at times whimsical 16mm cinematography. What emerges is a visionary account of grief, growth and the affirming power of storytelling.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival