‘Six Months In a Pink And Blue Building’ Cannes Review: Bruno Santamaría Rezo’s Autobiographical Film Is Tender, Honest, And Quietly Devastating

The coming-of-age story set against a family in crisis can feel like well-trodden ground — and more so, as this Mexican film makes plain, when the director is drawing directly from his own life. Yet Bruno Santamaría Rezo manages to sidestep the expected pitfalls even while making use of familiar materials, including documentary sequences that bridge the fiction onscreen with the real events behind it, leaving no doubt that this is his story to tell.

The family of young Bruno (Jade Reyes) lives in a small apartment in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Father, mother, two brothers, and a steady stream of friends and neighbors pass through a warm and welcoming home, the kind where parties happen easily and the general mood is one of affection. Bruno, the eldest son and clear center of gravity, is moving through a period of sexual awakening — drawn more to his friend Vladimir than to any of the girls at school, though he hasn’t found the words for it yet. And then, in the middle of all that private turbulence, comes something that unsettles the whole household: his father has HIV-AIDS, at a time when the diagnosis still carried the weight of a death sentence.

From that point on, Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building moves through these spaces and feelings and the conflicts they generate. The parents are struggling with each other, and the apartment absorbs that tension. Bruno, in his own way, manages the accumulating pressure: the possibility of losing his father, the feelings stirring inside him toward his friend, and the social expectations pushing him toward a girlfriend — especially now that a girl at school has made her interest in him clear.

In some ways the film recalls Lila Avilés’ Tótem — another Mexican film built not as a conventional narrative but as a series of vignettes, episodes, and observed moments. As in that film, there is a high density of people packed into small spaces, an illness shaping the emotional weather of the story, and a filmmaker more interested in watching the world carefully than in constructing a tidy arc. The differences are real — in class, in explicit sexual content, in texture — but the sensibility and the search feel kindred.

There are many scenes here that are tender, beautiful, and quietly strange, a number of them shared between Bruno and Vladimir, always freighted with the subtext of one boy’s discovery of himself. One that comes later, between Bruno and his father (played by Lázaro Gabino), hits hard in a different register entirely — an emotionally direct conversation in which both characters finally put words to their fears about death, and in which the faces of both actors will break the audience’s heart.

It is a striking fiction debut for the director of the documentary Things We Dare Not Do, and it carries the emotional authenticity that only comes from a filmmaker who has lived what he is showing — honest, warm, and genuinely moving.