Selected and presented by Jamie Crewe

Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo is a documentary film directed by Yulene Olaizola and released in 2008. Staged over the course of a day, it depicts the director interview her grandmother, Rosa Elena Carbajal, and her grandmother’s housekeeper, Florencia Vega Moctezuma, in the grand lodging house, formerly owned in the colonia of Anzures, Mexico City. Yulene asks questions about a former resident – a young man called Jorge Riosse, with whom Rosa formed a particular bond and of whom traces can be found all over the house. Their account of Jorge unfolds at the speed of discretion and with the casual fireworks of familial gossip. Slowly a complex, perplexing and shocking story is almost unfurled.

I love this film for its sense of partial revelation. Facts and theories emerge muttered, or as if you already knew. It reminds me of my mother updating me on something serious which she never told me about in the first place; of a partner saying something chilling to me that I was too surprised to object to; of a friend telling me scandalous gossip about my crush, in reaction to which I couldn’t even recognise their name for long seconds. Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo illustrates the instinctive or ingrained ways we avoid facing what disturbs us and how it bleeds through or bursts from us anyway; from strange angles, in choked voices.