 Yeah, movies we can learn from. And here's one for you, Plaza Catedro. And George Casey and I have looked at it, and we want to report to you on it. This is a movie in Spanish, and it's shot in Panama City, Panama. And if you didn't know, Panama does not run north-south, it runs west-east. And in fact, the Panama Canal, which is right there in Panama City, is a north-south across the west-east. And when it connects with the body, with the continent of South America, it connects at Columbia. And Columbia and Panama both cooperated in this film. This is the first Panamanian film you've ever seen. It involves a woman, the star of the film, is at least in the fiction of it. And it is fiction, thank goodness. She is a Mexican woman, an architect trained as an architect, who is working in Panama City. So you see the different cultures involved. You see the way the Panamanians treat somebody who came from Mexico, although they all speak Spanish. So George, this movie opens, it establishes itself by showing you how totally depressed this woman is. She's lost her six-year-old son. She's trying to cope. She's working in some kind of architectural real estate firm in Panama City. And actually, her boss is played by what? The guy who produced the movie, Abner Benayam. It's all in Spanish. It's subtitled. It's on Netflix. And it's excellent. So let's look at what happens here. Let's look at the evolution development of the plot. She starts off, she's very unhappy. She's lost her six-year-old son. She's suicidal, as a matter of fact. And this is a wrinkle in her depression, but it doesn't really solve the problem. Can you talk about how the plot evolves? They show her, as you said, sort of suicidal. She's looking down, ready to jump. And then they show her in her mind jumping off the building to commit suicide. And not only did her little son die in a tragic accident circumstances, which we can get into, her husband and her are getting divorced because he's accusing her of not adequately taking care of the kid at the time of the incident happened. So she's also dealing with a divorce from her husband, who they showed they had a good love relationship. So basically, as she's right out- The loss of her son is so accentuated by her husband's action in blaming her. Her whole life is in a terrible condition. See, I have my cousin Valerie, her kid, Zachary. He died in bad circumstances at 19. So I understand this, what a woman who loses a child feels. So I didn't want to actually get into that. But the thing is, from that point, you go into, she's parking her car in front of her fancy residence, right? Her, got a beautiful apartment. Her residence is right across from the cathedral. And the cathedral is a beautiful building. It's a beautiful piece of architecture. And at some point in this program, I would like to explore with you the significance of the cathedral and the significance of her apartment just a few feet away from it. Yes. And the fact that they named the movie as a cathedral. Exactly. That's precisely what I was going to get into. And so she's there and she's parking her car in front of her apartment. And this young kid, about 13, 14 years old, keeps bugging her about he wants to, you know, he's sort of taken over those parking places and he's charging $3 for anybody for parking, you know, in the street, right? In public place, right? And then he wants to wash her car. So he's bugging her. And she's really not interested in paying him. But he's insisting, and he's a very insistent young kid, right? And so basically, eventually she breaks down, she gives him a dollar, you know, whatever. And she started getting to know him a little bit. And then what happens, he goes back to his neighborhood or something and he gets shot. So he rushes to her place or maybe it was the same neighborhood and runs up the steps to her apartment. He must have found the door open and he's bleeding. And she comes home. Remember that he has skill. He has skill. He can open any door. He's open. He can pick any lock. Oh, right. The child of the street. He can do crime anytime. We didn't know that until later, just like you like when the pieces don't fit together until the end. But at that point in time, we didn't know, we don't know how he got it. But I guess you're right. That's how he got it. So, so he's, he was bleeding, you know, all and then she finds him on the steps, you know, up on the steps, he was shot in the stomach. So as the mother instinct or whatever personal instinct she takes over and she starts taking care of him, gets him to the hospital where the doctors sew him up, you know, take out the bullet and sew him up. And then after he gets sewn up, he rushes out of the, he escapes from the hospital and comes back to her. And she says, why did you escape? He doesn't want the police to see his face. You know, he doesn't want them to call in the police. And you don't know at that point why, you know, but you learn later, should I let the cat out of the bag of why? Yeah. His stepfather is a police officer and he's running from his stepfather because his stepfather has impregnated his 16 year old sister. And I think she might have been younger than that. Yeah, well, she was very young. Maybe she was very pregnant. Yeah, the stepfather impregnated her. So, so the thing is, he must have been angry at his stepfather and said something to him. So the stepfather wants to, because he was going to go to, I think he was going to squeal on the stepfather. So the stepfather wanted to kill him. So it's probably the stepfather either had him shot or shot himself, right? So this is, this is what's happened. This all unfolds gradually as you have discussed. You don't know any a lot of this until later in the film. And little by little, the pieces start falling into place. So eventually, this architect played by Ilsa Salas was a very, she's won a lot of awards. She's a really good Mexican actress. She takes, she sort of her mother instinct plays in and she starts, they start building a bond between her and this young kid. You know, the fact that she lost her six year old, there's a big puke, a big hole in her heart. So I mean, this kid sort of feeling that, that void, you know, a little bit. So she's taking care of him. And then she tries to want to find out what's this all about. And she goes and she's on his cell phone. She sees the sister Yolanda or something like that had been texting him or calling him. So she tracks down the architects tracks down the sister and finds out that she's pregnant. You can see she's very pregnant. And the sister tells her that it was the father that, you know, that did this to her. So then she tries to find out about the stepfather and she goes into his bed, you know, bar where they have all women, you know, that, you know, they dancing, women dancing and then, you know, new women dancing, you know, the kind of men's bar, right? But in a bad neighborhood and she sees the stepfather there. And then what happens is, you know, she's learning about the stepfather more and more. So she understands the whole situation and she leaves and then she, when she comes back again to try to find the kid again, right? Because then she's looking for the, the kid comes in the meantime, the kid goes into her locked safe area and steals some money, but no watch, no other valuables. And he disappears. So someone says to her, you know, I think her doctor said, or her husband, that, you know, he probably needed to get a gun. And that's exactly what happened. He went and bought a gun. So when she shows up in that neighborhood with a little kid is right, she, the 14 year old, she, he puts, pulls the gun on her and then she tells him, don't, don't do that. And he takes down the gun. But shortly after that, the stepfather comes out of the bar, right? And literally they start shooting, you know, he starts shooting at the kid. So the architect goes to protect the kid, right? And gets shot. And in the meantime, as she's dying, she, she kills the stepfather. And that's how the movie ends. But the key point here is Abner Benayim wants to show how young, young men, young kids are under threat in these, in Central American countries, South American countries that they're, they're getting killed. And they showed that her at a morgue where there were two before, which was still looking for this kid, two young kids shot in the morgue. And she was, neither one was him. But then, and then at the end, as, as, as his protector, the architect is dying and his stepfather is dying, he's just running. That's how the movie ends. So don't, don't tell the very end of it. We'll have to save that for the end of our show. There's a post script on this movie that that is shattering, shattering. It's actually not part of the movie. But it is a a shattering fact. Now, whatever I missed, Jay, you can probably, you got to, you got to sometimes have better recollection. That was a pretty good rendition of the way it worked. But let me, let me tell you some of the points of education movies we can learn from, right? So, you know, Panama, it's goes from west to east. And it hits South America at Columbia. Panama City is a very cosmopolitan place. Lots of skyscrapers. In fact, our, our friend, the architect is working on a huge skyscraper that must be 50 stories tall. You don't expect that in Panama City, in Latin America. And in fact, she's trying to sell one of the units there, 50 stories up to these people who want to buy it. And what's remarkable is that the building isn't finished. This would never happen in the U.S. The building would have to be at least mostly finished. But it's a construction site, and she's trying to sell. So you get this feeling of, you know, building big buildings, a city with lots of lights and skyscrapers and things happening. It is not a sleepy town at all. That's Panama City and it's cosmopolitan as it can be. Probably has a lot to do with the canal, you know, which is not an American, thanks to Jimmy Carter, which is not an American canal anymore. And the other, the other thing that I found interesting was that she was in a, in school in architecture school doing, doing whatever, you know, middle-class architects do in Mexico, Mexico City. And she moved. Maybe she moved to get away from the tragedy of her family. But now she moved from Mexico City to Panama City and, and you, and you realize that it's connected. Although there's a number of countries, Guatemala, I forget El Salvador, there's the two or three countries between Panama and Mexico. It's not, you know, a contiguous border at all. And you realize that these countries are connected and that you can be a middle-class architect in Mexico City and decide you want to go to Panama City and there you go. Which, you know, it's, that's, that's kind of interesting that it's, it is a larger community. Everybody speaks Spanish. So you can do that. You can get along. The other thing about it is that, is that there are a lot of little countries in Central America and South America. And they're really not very well organized. They, they're, and I think it's thanks, thanks in large part to the U.S. and what followed the Monroe doctrine in the 1820s. You know, the fact is that we haven't taken care of, of our friends to the South and we are not taking care of them now. And you have a society that has a huge wealth gap in Panama. And you and I, you and I looked at Panama just a few weeks ago when we reviewed the Laundromat movie, you know? That was an important connection with Panama too. There was money laundering going on there. It was, you know, a lot of international crime, I'm sure still exists. Anyway, my point is though that it's a, it's a broken place. Central America is broken. Some say Mexico is broken. And, and the countries in South America are broken. And this, this relationship that we see examined in Plaza Cathedral is a relationship that takes place in a broken culture, a broken society. The kid was a street wave. He was a handsome kid. You know, he, in the U.S., he might have had a, a good life. He was strong and smart. He might have had a good life, but this life was watching cars for people and extorting them for a dollar or two or three under threat that he would damage their car unless they paid him on the street. I don't know if you noticed, but when, when she parked, he had these combs, these orange combs on the sidewalk. He had reserved that spot, belong to him. He wasn't the only, the only kid, by the way, who was doing that. The whole street was rife with these, you know, waves, the poor kids who had no other options in life. And what made it worse, of course, is this family situation with the, his young sister pregnated by the stepfather. And the stepfather was a policeman who carried a gun around. The stepmother was, you know, also very pathetic. And they lived in a pathetic apartment, in a pathetic neighborhood, not too far away from the Plaza Cathedral. It's almost like the church was looking over all this. The church was completely ineffective in, in making a reasonable society for these people. The movie itself is dedicated to all the senseless violence of children in Latin America. And then, you know, you wonder, and you don't have to wonder, you wonder about all these people coming up from countries in which there was senseless violence and, and gangs and poverty and the wealth gap. So she had a reasonable economic experience, you know, as an architect and worked in an office and, you know, and, and she could sell these fancy condos. But, but in fact, it was a broken society. And the kid was an example subject to violence at home by a, by a law enforcement official who was subjecting the whole family there to violence. So I think, you know, the, the, the director of the filmmaker, Abner Benayam, wanted to show you by dedicating the film this way to this broken society in Panama City and probably in other such cities in Central America, leading to all those migrants, you know, who crossed through Mexico and try to get into the United States, because it's so dangerous. I went talking life and death dangerous all day long with poverty all around them, the inability to have a life of any quality whatsoever of suffering and fear and, and of course, lethal violence. And all this a few blocks away from the cathedral, a failure in every way. And you described the neighborhood in which they live, in which our, our star, whose name is Fernando was the kid. Yeah. And he's powerful, powerful actor at 13 or 14 or 15, whatever he's his real age. He's not, not a good-looking actress, but she's, you know, a sad, sad sack looking at his head and playing the role of a sad sack character for sure. But you, you empathize with her immediately and throughout the movie because, you know, most of us would have responded to this bleeding kid outside the door saying he's desperate and he needs her and he's bleeding and he's been shot. And she took him in, I guess it was partly because, at least according to the way the movie moves, partly because, you know, she was suffering the loss of her six-year-old and she was depressed beyond description, suicidally depressed. And this kid offered her, you know, some consolation. You offered her a bond, a relationship, a replacement for her kid and her family, which was gone essentially. I think the interesting thing, and I'm not quoting exactly, but one of her friends said to her, and when she told him, you know, that she was, that she had taken this kid into her home, be careful. Those kids from the street are dangerous. Exactly. And then the audience has left wondering for the rest of the movie, is this kid dangerous? You know, is he, he's obviously trying to tidal up to her. It suits him to do that, but he may be dangerous and you wonder and wonder and wonder, and then you find out that he is dangerous. At the same time, you also find out that he has some empathy for her and they do have a relationship, even though it's a fatal relationship. It's like a fatal attraction kind of relationship. Exactly. So there's this, you know, this moment where he steals the money from her safe and he feels he has to go back to his home and have to go back to the street again. I'm not sure what turned him in the movie anyway, but turned him back to that life and he runs away from her after she saves his life in the hospital affair. And then she follows him and this is the most powerful, as you said, part of the movie. He, he, she finds him all right and he has this gun and say, big gun he bought and he points it right at her chest, right at her heart and once, you know, click of the trigger and she, she would have killed her for sure. And now the two of them are maybe a foot apart. And she says to him, you know, I thought we had something. You don't really want to kill me, do you? He's thinking of killing her. You know that he is actually a bad kid, but somehow she created what she found in him, some kind of humanity. And he decides, she says, give me the weapon, give me the weapon. And he thinks about it and he gives her the weapon. Now she has the weapon. And at this point, this cop father heads out of the girly bar, the pole dancing bar, brush the street and he's ready to go after the kid and he shoots at the kid and she saves the kid by shooting not once, but twice at this cop, realizing, I'm sure she did realize as a character in the movie that this was not going to be good for her. Ultimately, she kills the cop, but not before he shoots her back and kills her. And then the kid runs away. And the last moments of the film is he's running down this horrible ghetto, disgusting neighborhood street not far from the cathedral. And he's been liberated because this cop was making life absolutely miserable. Now he can take care of his sister and his mother and they can lead a life in poverty, but without the threat of this awful cop, this gangland kind of cop. And there you see the last moments of the film him running away, liberated from what was making him crazy and making a street person out of him. But now you have to drop the bomb on everybody so they know the end of the story, George. First, let me say that if you look at her pictures in other movies, she's not that unattractive. I think that the director, for some reasons, didn't want to make her that interactive in this movie, because you see her pictures in other movies, she's more attractive. But the bomb shell of this is that the actor, Fernando Xavier de Costa, who was excellent, he was an excellent actor, right? He later, the actor himself got shot in the street and killed. And I read that it was partially because of COVID because he could no longer go to his dancing class, and he could no longer go to school. So he was cooped up for a year or two. And then he started going out again, because I guess he got tired of being home. And that's when, for some reason, they don't even know the complete circumstances, he was shot. And then all the other actors and the director are praising him and honoring him after he was killed. That sort of brings what Abner Ben-Ahim was trying to say to the fore. It's like that this is what happens to kids in Central and South America, except for Costa Rica. Costa Rica is sort of like the outlier. It's not that poor, and it's more educated. But you have to know the history of Costa Rica to understand why. So this is what the director was trying to show. And the actual, what happened to that young actor is case in point, why this movie is so important. Yeah, and the murder of the actor. By that time, he was probably no more than 15 years old. The murder of the actor, Fernando Javier Dacosta took place before the movie was released. So it had nothing to do with the fact that he was in the movie. Nothing at all, as far as we know. And instead, it was just an example, a very coincidental and tragic example of what goes on with young people in the streets of Panama City because that's where he lived. And so we get, you know, this whole picture of this odd, disjointed community with skyscrapers and lights and traffic, rich people, huge Catholic churches, okay, and kids who cannot survive, who are not only killed, you know, or threatened in the movie, but they are killed in real life. Remarkable. And, you know, when that comes up on the screen at the end of the movie, it just blows you away. Because what it does is it confirms, it confirms the story that Abner Benjamin was trying to tell us. And I think, you know, this movie, it doesn't pretend to have any English in it. It's all in Spanish. It's all south of the border. It's all in a dangerous, dangerous place, you know. And it does convey the danger, the risk, the mortal fear that people live in. And you begin to understand that it's not only, you know, people who are subject to the gangs, per se, it's people who are subject to the kind of senseless violence that they talk about. And those are the people who want sanctuary. Those are the people who want to have a better life in the United States. And we really have to have some rational policy, immigration reform in order to deal with this whole continent, you know, that's broken. I agree with you. Costa Rica is probably an exception. Colombia may be an exception, too. But for the most part, these, all these countries are problems. And Central America is not a place you want to be. I mean, a reaction in the streets of that ghetto was, let me out of here. I don't even want to watch it. It is so dangerous. And if you were a gringo walking around down there, wow, your life would be, you know, would be threatened from the moment you entered that place. Precisely, right? So, you know, I guess it's one thing if you just have a, if you just look at it from the ground up and see the violence and the threat, and the, you know, the awful circumstances that make people want to come to the United States. But this was more complex, more nuanced than that. Because you saw the wealthy also, you saw the professional, you saw the, you know, the the riches of Panama City, just as we did in the Laundromat movie. But one thing is clear that the United States doesn't know or care and doesn't, hasn't taken care of these places. It hasn't even tried to make life worth living. And then we build walls on the southern border on top of that. So it's a shame on us that this movie is so brutal. It's a shame on us that we haven't helped, you know, the people in Latin America create better lives for themselves. And we could, we could, but we don't. Yep. It's how true, Jay. So true. Well, George, this is, I mean, it sounds depressing, but more than depressing, it's educational. Yes. There are so many things we learned that we did not know. That's what appeals to me about this movie, about people, about life below the border, south of the border, about other countries there. And I guess about the world in general. And we, we should, we should be so, like my mother used to say to me, we should be so happy. We are in this country, born in this country. And yet these days, you're not sure about the future of the country. You're not sure about civil rights, about, you know, the, the rights we've enjoyed over the years, the safety, the public safety in general that we've had. Because what, what happened to this kid? What happened in the, in the dark streets of Panama City? That could, that could happen here more than, more than it already is happening here. And, you know, we could have the kind of gross corruption that you see in south of the border right here in America. And I, you know, that's the scariest part of all. And I fear that we may be closer to that than we think. So when my mother said to me, thank God you were born in this country. This is the greatest country on earth. You know, maybe, it is maybe, but it may not be later. So true. And you know, the kid, I lit a little bit of reading about his family, the actor. They were not really poverty. They were sort of middle class, you know, Panamanians. And he must have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't think from what I was reading that they were living in such a bad, in a negative neighborhood, you know, they're probably living in a better neighborhood. So he just happened to be out and out and about. And for some reason was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it's ubiquitous. Oh, you mean the actor? The actor. Not the character in the movie. The actor. The actor himself, his family was, was probably more middle class. Because if you read about his life, he was in dancing school. He was in school, you know, his family, from what I can ascertain, was probably of a higher economic level, maybe not like the architect, but not poverty stricken. And he still got killed. So, you know, this is, this is, this is important to, to understand what goes on in these countries, you know, the sadness and these kids getting shot and, and Mexico too, you know, you read all the time about Mexico problems, people getting killed in Mexico. And here now in America, we're getting a lot, there's a lot of people shooting. So you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And some gunman, you know, comes and kills you, you know. So like you're saying, Jay, where are we going from here, you know, and there's some real issues that we have to deal with. And we don't really, you know, America, the ugly American, if you look all around the world, we've talked about this. Sometimes the CIA, you know, goes and we, we, we brought down the shop, Jimmy Carter, you know, he's trying to get rid of this bad Savak Shah and then look what we placed it. So, you know, we, we don't do good in Central America, but we do bad in other places in the world and we create situation worse than what we had before. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Well, I want to respond to your thing about the guns. You know, this country has a huge problem with guns. There are 400 million guns in this country and they are used, you know, and people say they make absurd remarks like, well, I need it for self-defense. Sure, you need an assault rifle for self-defense. Sure, you do. We're ready for the assault. Yes. But, you know, sort of leads to violence. Yeah. Now, we still, at least for the moment, we have the rule of law. We have some sense of community in most places, but in these Latin American countries, the rule of law ain't so good and the sense of community is not so good. They may have strong family ethic, but not community ethic because the government is completely ineffective and has been that way for a long time. And then on top of that, and here's the point, on top of that, you have guns. So, as the, what do you want to call it, the integrity of the community declines and the guns keep on increasing, then you get what happened in the movie and in real life to this kid, this actor, you get murder on the streets. And I think that's one element. The plot of this movie could not have happened, but for the guns, everybody had a bloody gun. So, it accelerates the decline of the social compact. It accelerates the sense of personal safety and security. And it's a good lesson for us to look at as we do bloody nothing about guns in this country. Exactly. That's where we're headed, you know. Precisely. And also the economic divide, what's happening from the 50s after Reagan came in, the economic divide between the very wealthy here in America and the poor and the middle-class sinking, that is what's creating a lot of this strife is that you've got such unbelievable diversity and people are angry, you know. So, the prospects for the future, as I see it, are not good as we've alluded to. We have some issues. This is a point we made in our Burning National Issues program last week, where we covered a variety of national burning issues. And one of the things that struck me is that people don't realize the complexity of life without democracy. They almost think that, oh, well, you know, democracy, voting rights, all that. We can get along. It'll be a little different. It'll be more than a little different. And it's a fair chance that we'll be stripped of our personal rights and civil rights in a world like the world that Donald Trump wants to have. And that is, people don't realize that could happen to them. So, I think we all have to be very mindful that without these personal rights and civil rights and with guns and a broken society, your life is going to be very unpleasant. It is not going to be like it has been. That might be coming soon. Okay, we're done. Thank you, George. Great discussion. Give me a rating. What's your rating on this? Rotten tomatoes gave it a 10. 10 plus. Except I don't like the violence. I will give it a 10 plus because of the plot and everything. But I still have to say, I don't like the ending. They could have ended without killing the star. It was so tragic. But I think he wanted to make the point and he could not have made the point so powerfully if he hadn't had that last scene that we talked about. I would also give it a 10, George. We're together on that. Thank you so much. We have many movies to go and we'll be doing some really powerful, strong, nonfiction movies coming up. Yes. That will shake you up. Thank you so much, George. Aloha. Thank you. Aloha. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.