Shakespeare and Victor Hugo's Intimacies

An old lodging house sits where two streets meet in Mexico City. The streets are named Shakespeare and Víctor Hugo. Rosa Carbajal runs the house. She is also the director’s grandmother. Olaizola sets her camera down inside those rooms. Rosa begins to talk about a lodger from years earlier. Jorge Riosse stayed in that room for seven years. She remembers him as a gifted painter and musician. She also says the same man may have killed someone. As the account goes on, memory and suspicion fold into each other. The house turns into the setting of a crime story. The documentary has been shown at more than forty festivals. The telling runs entirely through Rosa’s voice. It asks how far a family’s memory can be trusted. A small house yields a heavy tension. Rosa Elena Carbajal and Florencia Vega Moctezuma appear in the eighty three minute documentary. It is a Mexican production Yulene Olaizola finished in 2009.