Years We Fell Apart: Razo Resurrects the Final Throes of Childhood
For his first narrative feature, documentary filmmaker Bruno Santamaría Razo utilizes a docu-hybrid in Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, an enigmatic title grasping at the wisps of memory from his own childhood related to a health scare involving his father. Set in Mexico City in the early 1990s, Razo anchors a cathartic exploration of a specific period of time by interviewing his mother regarding her interpretation of what was going on when their family was suddenly thrust into distress as they awaited confirmation of his father’s potential HIV diagnosis. The halcyon glory of his eleventh birthday party ends with a stab of fear, sending the fragile balance of his parents’ relationship into a disarray which completely upends all their lives. Less auto fiction than a therapeutic recuperation of lives distorted and irrevocably defined by traumas born from significant cultural sentiments and circumstances, Razo’s exploration is part of a unique cycle of queer survival cinema determined to honor the spiritual carnage which defined the generation of gay men coming of age during the AIDS crisis.
Razo doesn’t so much delineate between reenactment and reality so much as weave them together like jagged patchwork. The result is its own poetic rhythm, and bears a similar essence as the title to a Joyce Carol Oates story, which asks, “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” The child actors are reacting to and observing the tumultuous responses of the adults, including parents, teachers, and schoolmates who each are navigating their own interpretation of the disjointed information available to them. The infection isn’t so much HIV as it is the fear of societal repercussions, the threat of a social disease. In the flashbacks, Razo quite eloquently tries to reenact the reality of his parents, who were involved in a formidably progressive relationship as a way to satisfy the demands placed upon a seemingly successful heteronormative family unit. These portions of the film strongly recall Carla Simon’s Summer 1993 (2017), in which a young girl sent to live with relatives after her mother’s death begins to absorb the toxic attitudes of a family shamed by AIDS.
Strikingly, Razo envisions his parents grappling with maintaining intimacy, the actors portraying his parents, Sofia Espinosa and Gabino Rodriquez, navigating both separate and intersecting sexual desires and needs. It’s clear the adults are desperately trying to shield the children from the reality of the situation as best they can, perhaps most strikingly in a hushed argument over the dishes regarding ‘contact tracing,’ interrupted by the kids irritated about not having cable. Also part of the acting ensemble is the lovely Teresa Sanchez as a kindly grandmother (of Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies and Lila Aviles’ Totem).
As Razo winds through this period, he begins to lean more into interview footage from the present, which yields several surprising moments as we, the audience, live through the tension of his father’s impending diagnosis. Eventually, Razo himself makes an appearance, sitting in front of the camera to be interviewed by his mother. The tender explorations of his feelings for childhood friend Victor from the reenactments suddenly take on another dimension as Razo articulates how reactions towards his father instilled a formidable sense of shame regarding his own developing sexuality.
Much like recent titles, including Memory Box (2021) and Nina Roza (2026), where prodigal characters are confronted with lives and cultures haunting them despite having left them behind long ago, Razo’s exercise suggests an ultimate catharsis exists in a deliberative, intentional, and creative reckoning. Like a number of younger filmmakers dealing with the ghosts of the AIDS crisis, such as Diego Céspedes with The Mysterious Gaze of the Pink Flamingo (2025) and Los Frikis (2024) from Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz (dealing with dire responses towards the queer community during the AIDS crisis in Chile and Cuba, respectively), Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, feels part of a new digital movement of the AIDS memorial quilt. Entrenched in its metaphorical title is the color coded gender binary dictated to us as reality. Razo’s approach, evoking a prison sentence, suggests it’s merely a literal and figurative edifice from which we all have the ability to remove ourselves.
Reviewed on May 19th at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (79th edition) – Critics’ Week. 105 Mins
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
