In this hybrid documentary, Bruno Santamaría Razo returns to his childhood. He reconstructs his family home and has actors reenact his memories. When Bruno’s real mother walks through the set and sees family photographs featuring the actors’ faces, an intimate dialogue between past and present emerges.
Together, they return to Mexico City in the early 1990s. Bruno celebrates his eleventh birthday in a free-thinking family; he wears makeup and skirts, his parents join in exuberantly, and he develops feelings for his best friend. In the background, word is going around that Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is being filmed just around the corner, while panic over the AIDS crisis mounts on television. When the family learns that Bruno’s father has HIV, they try to keep the threatening reality at bay with humor, love, and music.
Fiction becomes a way of filling the gaps in Bruno’s memories of the time when he was discovering his sexuality and watching the virus transform the world both beyond and within his family. Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building is a playful, layered portrait of a queer childhood marked by fear, freedom, and resilience.
