In George Nicholas’ Monero-powered short film ‘Límite’, a Mexican teenage girl is drawn into a web of cross-border crime with tragic consequences.
The film tells the story of 16-year-old Manuel. Manuel’s desire to assert his independence and defeat the toughs of his neighbors leads him out of his grandfather’s orbit and into the clutches of a cartel drug trafficking organization.
Director George Nicholas was inspired by the case of Cruz Velazquez Acevedo, who died in U.S. custody after customs officials forced him to drink liquid methamphetamine he was carrying during a border stop.
“I don’t know if inspiration is the right word. It was a necessity,” he said. decodingSCENE added, “It was probably made out of guilt.” “You know, I’m an American myself and I’m just watching how these kids are treated at the border.”
Nicholas, who is originally from Bulgaria, drew parallels between the situation in Mexico and Bulgaria in the 1990s.
“It was almost like gangs were running the country right after the fall of communism,” he said. “So I think it’s a combination of remembering my youth but also feeling like I have some responsibility as an American for what happens at the border.”
Monero’s lead role
Límite was filmed in Tijuana with local crew and actors. Monero It is a community with cryptocurrency as the main character.
“After making the film, I was looking for support to release it, because festival submissions are expensive and publicists are expensive,” Nicholas explained. “I was fortunate to receive support from them,” said Nicholas after submitting his proposal to the Monero Community Crowdfunding System (CCS).
Nicholas requested 154 XMR, worth approximately $25,000 at the time of the request. That amount of Monero would have been worth slightly more, about $26,000, when the funds were finally disbursed in November 2023.
“I couldn’t put any other cryptocurrency in my film,” Nicholas said, adding that privacy-focused Monero is “a cryptocurrency project that gives me hope for the future.”
The film features Monero in the form of actual coins given to Manuel by his absent father. Because it has the cryptocurrency’s “M” logo on it, he assumes it’s “a souvenir or something specific to him,” without understanding its true value, Nicholas explained.
“The coin in the film symbolizes Manuel’s potential and unrealized talent,” he said. “He was lusting after cars and shiny objects and clothes and it turns out he had them in his pockets but he didn’t know what they were or how to unlock them.”
“I think the analogy with cryptocurrencies, like almost everything else, is that you need a certain level of knowledge to unleash the full potential it holds,” Nicholas added.
The name of the cryptocurrency is not mentioned in the conversation. This is an intentional decision by the director. “I didn’t want it to feel like product placement,” he said. He said, “I wanted the audience to engage with the idea, see the logo, and hear that it’s untraceable and better than Bitcoin. And that’s it.”
The “untraceable” Monero is widely known as a privacy coin. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a public ledger containing pseudo-anonymous addresses that can be linked to the user’s identity, Monero uses a variety of cryptographic techniques to protect the user’s identity.
This has landed lawmakers and regulators around the world in hot water. While many cryptocurrency exchanges have delisted them, the UK government this month singled out privacy coins as “not serving the public interest.”
However, Nicholas takes issue with Monero’s definition of a “privacy coin.”
“It’s much more important than that, because privacy is a really fundamental need before you can get good things like freedom of expression, ownership, and censorship resistance,” he said. “All these things that people talk about in the cryptocurrency space are kind of neutralized by the lack of privacy.”
The arrest of the founders of Bitcoin mixer Samourai Wallet last month and the ongoing case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm have raised fears of a crackdown on privacy projects by US law enforcement. triggered.
In recent days, several coin mixing tools have blocked access to US citizens, and CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden issued a “final warning” about Bitcoin privacy on Twitter. Just this week, Monero P2P exchange LocalMonero announced that it was “easing down” its operations, citing a “combination of internal and external factors” for its decision to shut down.
In Nicholas’ eyes, Bitcoin privacy tools like Samourai Wallet are “fundamentally flawed.” He pointed out, “They weren’t really censorship-resistant. It was a server run by someone somewhere, and the government could come in and say plenty about it.”
In his view, the power of cryptocurrency, and more specifically Monero, lies in “people coming together to form something unstoppable.”
He added, “I sincerely hope that cryptocurrency will have a positive impact on people’s lives.” “One of the only ways I see it, other than increasing the numbers, is to give people some degree of privacy and autonomy through these technologies.”
Editor: Andrew Hayward
