Plaza Catedral

There’s a popular approach to selling real estate which says that houses should be sold on their external aspects and the space they offer, but that their interiors should be as plain as possible, so that prospective buyers will find it easy to project their own desires onto them. Alicia (Ilse Salas) sells houses like that. She’s an architect whose own ideas get little attention at work, but who is valued for her ability to attract wealthy people to these artificially neutral spaces far removed from the dirt and fumes and crowded streets which constitute reality for many residents of Panama City.

Alicia looks like an empty house. She dresses in similar neutral tones. Her face is a blank. As we follow her home and begin to get to know her, we learn that living this way makes it easier for her to move through the world. She lets people project what the wish onto her; she doesn’t have to worry too much about meeting contradictory expectations of how a grieving mother should be. Her little boy, Lucas, has been dead for some time now. She has separated from his father. She is practical in how she continues to navigate life, but there’s an absence at the heart of her, a vacant space, and her disinclination to search for another tenant doesn’t mean that no-one takes notice.

The teenager is Alexis (Fernando Xavier De Casta). He calls himself Chief. He makes his living through a commonplace protection racket, asking drivers for money to ‘look after’ their parked cars. Most people pay, not so much because they expect their vehicles to be damaged otherwise, but to assuage their consciences, to ensure that the enterprising poor can eat. Alicia refuses to shell out as much as five dollars for the privilege of parking outside her own apartment. Her spikiness mirrors his own, guaranteeing that they will remember each other. When, a few days later, she finds him in her stairwell, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to the stomach, she rushes him to hospital. He survives, but turns up on her doorstep. He had to flee the hospital after treatment; they would have arrested him. Will she give him sanctuary?

Chief is 13. He strives for an adult level of independence, but in other ways he’s still a young child. His casual selfishness belies the fact that he has been motivated, at least in part, by trying to help someone else. He’s alternately obnoxious and charming. He lies as a matter of course, but Alicia knows well enough to expect that, if not to understand the full extent of it. She’s careful about her boundaries. She pushes at his by insisting he take proper care of his wound and making him eat healthy food.

Panama’s 2022 Oscar submission, this is a film which might sound cloying sentimental, yet is anything but. The relationship with Alicia and her guest build is complicated by the fact that each remains aware of the other’s potential to be dangerous. Alicia’s past weighs heavily on her and Chief’s future is calling to him, perhaps equally horrific. “The younger ones are the worst,” warns a friend of Alicia’s, begging her to get the boy out of her house. But each needs something from the other, and perhaps the most dangerous thing of all is that they might find it.

Plaza Catedral screened at the 2022 London Jewish Film Festival. It’s an extremely polished piece of work from a small nation with a scant filmmaking history. it’s also a film marred by tragedy: De Casta, whose performance might have been the first step in a promising career, was murdered shortly after the completion of filmmaking. Dozens of children die on the streets of Panama every year. This makes the film’s themes all the more pertinent, and adds another dimension to Alicia’s insistence that there is another way to live.