Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building
(Seis meses en el edificio rosa con azul)
It’s the early 1990s in Mexico City, and Bruno is turning 11. Amid the exuberant celebrations, the sudden revelation that Bruno’s father has HIV throws the family into limbo. The boy’s blossoming feelings for his best friend Vladimir and the confusion around his father’s diagnosis collide with the social stigmas of the moment, while his parents try to sing and dance their collective pain away. Yet all of this is merely a memory, or the hazy perception of one—as thirty years later Bruno tries to reimagine what he could not quite understand as a child.
Bruno Santamaría Razo (Things We Dare Not Do, 2020 ChicagoIFF Gold Hugo winner, best documentary and OutLook Competition) leaps boldly into narrative filmmaking while embracing his documentary roots, weaving together a dreamlike fictionalization of his 11-year-old life with a camera turned on his real family members and himself. By tenderly embracing his child self’s perception and allowing his recollection to wander, Bruno confronts and questions this pivotal moment in his young life in a beautifully singular cinematic expression about a family’s reconciliation with memory.
