Bruno Santamaria Razo’s Pink and Blue Cannes Twist

At Cannes Critics’ Week, Bruno Santamaria Razo’s “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building” blends documentary and fiction, keeps audiences off-balance, and pivots around a father’s AIDS diagnosis—then detonates everything with a late bombshell interview reveal.

A hand-held camera moving through a small house in Mexico City opens “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building” like a question you can’t answer fast enough.. Bruno Santamaria Razo’s voice asks his mother. “Mom. did you see how the house turned out?” and a woman’s voice replies. “I didn’t know there were pictures of us that replaced our faces with the actors.”

From that first exchange. the film doesn’t just blur lines—it keeps tugging at them. making sure you never fully settle into what you’re watching.. The movie premiered on Tuesday in the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes. and it arrives with a bold. odd promise: a personal story shaped through documentary instincts and fictional techniques. withholding key information at times. then bringing in real family members. and even turning the director himself into someone who gets grilled on camera by his other.

The setup plays out with a kind of escalating mess.. Bruno tells his mother he’s going to interview her. but he’s barely pressed about his father’s illness before the film swings into a chaotic scene.. Actors playing his family begin getting ready for a party.. Makeup goes on; children and adults of both sexes line up in drag.. Two young boys crouch in a makeshift fort and talk about French kissing.. One of them is named Bruno—played by Jade Reyes—and is explicitly inspired by the director.

It’s Bruno’s messy 11th birthday. filmed in hand-held shots that mostly don’t move much—preferring to watch from a distance.. Music blasts.. The camera dips in and catches snippets of conversation, then dips out again.. On the radio, the big news seems to be that Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” is being shot nearby.

Yet inside the family, the real shift is brutal and immediate: Bruno’s father has been diagnosed with AIDS.. In the early 1990s. the diagnosis lands like two different conclusions at once—people assume death is coming. and they also assume the illness implies sexual relations with men.. That double pressure collides with a preteen boy’s new feelings for his best friend. Vladimir. and the film lets you feel how quickly ordinary coming-of-age worries become something sharper.

The story doesn’t arrive in a neat line. It comes out scattered and fragmentary—an illegal cable connection being hooked up in one scene, giant papier mache heads taking shape in the next. Then Bruno asks what will happen when his dad dies.

Dad’s answer is almost unbearably matter-of-fact: “Nothing,” he says. “You’ll live with your mother and brother. You’ll go to university. You’ll meet a girl. You’ll have kids. You’ll die. Your kids will have kids. They’ll die …”

Some stretches of the film play out against silence. Others are set to pop songs. Bruno and his dad draw on the wall, and their drawings come to life when they leave the room. And every so often, it cuts back to Santamaria Razo’s mother in that chair, answering his interview questions.

Then—about an hour in—the interview chair changes hands.. A different interview subject sits where his mother was. and a bombshell drops that upends what the film has led you to believe.. It’s too significant a surprise to spoil here.. What matters is the effect: the playful blend of biography and fiction that’s been unfolding like a messy party game snaps into sharper focus as more revelations follow. including the director’s mother turning the tables and coaxing another big revelation out of her son.

By the homestretch. “Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building” moves from weird and charming to weird and charming and provocative—the kind of pivot that feels designed rather than accidental.. Its turn toward the nature of truth echoes films as different as Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Four Daughters” and Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell. ” and it lands with a particular sting: you may come into it expecting to be guided. but you end up being tested.

It’s a low-budget but high-concept twister, and it seems to teach a simple lesson through its own method.. Don’t trust the filmmaker.. But don’t dismiss him. either—because once the film’s late revelations rearrange your sense of what’s real. you can’t help but embrace the odd little creation it’s been building all along.

Bruno Santamaria Razo Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building Cannes Critics’ Week Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet AIDS diagnosis documentary fiction film review