Las Horas Azules
Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2025. Best short, Valle Nuevo Film Festival 2026.
The programmer's note
Programmed for the last fifteen minutes, which are almost wordless and which we have now watched more times than we can defend. Salgado shot this before Temporada with the same cinematographer, and you can see the feature being worked out in it: the long lobby holds, the refusal to cut to a face for reassurance. Watch the older sister's hands when the ticket finally comes out of the pocket. Eighteen minutes, and no music until the end.
The film
Elsa and Toña have cleaned the twelfth floor of a bank tower on Paseo de la Reforma for six years. They arrive at four, they finish before the first analysts come up at seven, and they have a system: Elsa takes the glass, Toña takes the carpets, and neither of them touches a desk with photographs on it. Tonight Toña has a bus ticket to Villahermosa folded into her uniform pocket and has not found a way to say so. Salgado works in one location and one shift. The film watches labour at the exact hour when a building belongs to the people who maintain it: the radio smuggled in, the coffee from the twentieth floor kitchen, the fifteen minutes at the east windows when the sky turns over. The sisters talk about a cousin's wedding, a landlord, a man Toña used to see. What they do not talk about is loud, and Salgado lets it stay unsaid for seventeen of the eighteen minutes.
