In “Límite,” a Monero-backed short film directed by George Nicholas, a Mexican teenager is lured into a web of transnational crime that ends in tragedy.
The film follows 16-year-old Manuel, whose desire to assert his independence and confront the bad boys in his neighborhood leads him to break away from his grandfather's control and become embroiled in a drug cartel.
Director George Nicholas was inspired by the case of Cruz Velazquez Acevedo, who died in U.S. custody after being stopped at the border and forced by customs agents to drink liquid methamphetamine he was carrying.
“I don't know if inspiration is the right word, but it was more out of necessity,” he said. Decryption“Maybe it was out of guilt,” he added, “because I'm an American and I see the way kids are treated at the border.”
Nicholas, a native of Bulgaria, noted the similarities between the situation in Mexico and that in Bulgaria in the 1990s.
“It was a similar situation, right after the fall of communism, when gangs were running the country,” he said, “so I think it was a combination of reliving my youth and feeling like, as an American, I have a responsibility to what's going on at the border.”
Monero's hero
Filmed on location in Tijuana with local crew and actors, Monero It is a community and focuses on cryptocurrency.
“After I made the film, I was looking for support to get it released, because as we all know, submitting it to film festivals is expensive, and publicity is expensive,” Nicholas explains. After submitting a proposal to the Monero Community Crowdfunding System (CCS), Nicholas said, “I was lucky to get support from them.”
Nicholas asked for 154 XMR, which was worth around $25,000 at the time of the request. When the funds were finally paid out in November 2023, the value of that amount of Monero had increased slightly to around $26,000.
“There was no other cryptocurrency I wanted to include in my film,” Nicholas said, adding that privacy-focused Monero is “the crypto project that gives me hope for the future.”
In the film, Monero appears in the form of a physical coin given to Manuel by his absentee father. Because the coin bears the cryptocurrency's “M” logo, Manuel thinks it's a “souvenir, or something special just for me,” but doesn't understand its true value, Nicholas explained.
“The coin in the film symbolizes Manuel's potential and unrealized talent,” he said. “He was obsessed with cars, shiny things, clothes, but he had the coin in his pocket, he just didn't know what it was or how to open it.”
“I think the metaphor for crypto, like most things, is that you need a certain amount of knowledge to unlock the potential of what you have,” Nicholas added.
The name of the cryptocurrency is never mentioned in the dialogue, a deliberate decision on the part of the director. “I didn't want it to feel like product placement,” he says. “I just wanted the audience to know the idea, see the logo, know it's untraceable and better than Bitcoin. And that's it.”
“Untraceable” Monero is widely known as a privacy coin: unlike Bitcoin, which has a public ledger with pseudo-anonymous addresses that can be linked to users' identities, Monero uses various encryption techniques to protect the identities of its users.
This has drawn condemnation from lawmakers and regulators around the world, with a number of cryptocurrency exchanges delisting privacy coins, while the UK government this month named them as “not serving the public interest.”
However, Nicholas disputes Monero's definition of a “privacy coin.”
“Privacy is so much more important because it's a fundamental thing that you really need before you can get any of the nice things like freedom of expression, property rights, and resistance to censorship,” he said. “All these things that people are talking about in the crypto space are kind of hindered by a lack of privacy.”
The arrest of the founder of bitcoin mixer Samourai Wallet last month and the ongoing case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm have raised concerns about increased crackdowns on privacy projects by U.S. law enforcement.
Recently, multiple coin mixing tools have been blocked from access by US citizens, CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden issued a “final warning” about Bitcoin privacy on Twitter, and this week Monero P2P exchange LocalMonero announced it would be “winding down” its operations, citing a “combination of internal and external factors” as the reason for the decision to shut down.
In Nicholas's eyes, bitcoin privacy tools such as Samurai Wallet are “fundamentally flawed,” he said. “They're not really censorship-resistant. They're just servers run by someone somewhere, and a government can step in and say, 'enough is enough.'”
In his view, the power of cryptocurrencies, and Monero in particular, is “people coming together to form something unstoppable.”
“I truly hope that cryptocurrencies will have a positive impact on people's lives,” he added. “The only way that's going to happen, other than through growth in numbers, is if these technologies offer people a level of privacy and autonomy.”
Editor: Andrew Hayward
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