The Blue years

I came to live to an old house in downtown Guadalajara, when I was 21. A cheap room in a once luxurious run down house to share with other youngsters, was very attractive. Even a couple of cats were included, and I always liked cats. Back then, I couldn’t imagine that, after five years, when I left the house, I would be a very different person, and that so many convictions with which I had arrived, would fall down after facing other realities.
The house was already falling into pieces. The love that tenants tend to give is not enough and money is always missing. After decades, the house stopped being important to the owners, in a city where a historical neighborhood is no priority. But for us who recently inhabited it, the tiny ornaments, the old discolored broken tiles, a far date -1927- over the front door, are impressed in our memories as the scenery that saw us becoming adults. All late adolescents, completely distinct one to another, our sentimental education got framed between the multiple and opposed rooms, patios and roofs of Hospital Street number 721, El Santuario, downtown Guadalajara.
Since I left that house, in 2008, I began to think of this film. In an obscure stage. It didn’t take a different shape than a far longing until, a couple of years later, one of the persons who I lived with in that house, died. She was precisely the one who came, like a whirlwind, to change the apparent harmony, who united us like a family and signified for good that house and that time. My friend’s disappearance and, most likely, also the house’s, encouraged me to begin.
With this film I want to approach a currently unexplored universe in Mexican cinema: the lives of provincial middle and lower-middle class students, who represent part of the complex cultural mosaic of this country. Inhabiting a decaying historical monument in a big city far away from home, they build their lives, search for identity and find a new and dysfunctional family along the way.
I have always been moved by this thought: how many stories have those run down walls counted? By the anachronistic image of the vivacity in five youngsters beginning their lives over that stage. I think about the insignificance of my own story among all the others, after almost a century since that far 1927 that someone engraved over the entrance. I like to think that, together with the house, some aware spectator is still there to give a pinch of importance to what happened to us. Maybe a cat. That, through his eyes, the house and a few of its inhabitants, would remain.