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The first full-length documentary film produced by the University of Costa Rica (UCR) had its debut on the social video network YouTube on January 29th at 8:00 p.m. La Caja de Pandora: El Juego Oculto Contra el Seguro Social (Pandora’s Box: Foul Play Against Social Security), a critical look at the gradual decline of Costa Rica’s most treasured public institution, has been watched more than 60,000 times in just one week.
Pandora’s Box director Pablo Ortega is a professor at UCR. He is known for previous documentaries such as Fool’s Gold, The Petroleum Trap, and Costa Rica, Inc. Pandora’s Box is a two hour look at the ongoing fiscal crisis faced by La Caja, Costa Rica’s free system of universal health care and social security.
Professor Ortega explains that Pandora’s Box is:
“[… ] an effort to educate the public and to present a clear view of the process of decline of La Caja, which has been previously heralded as one of the most successful examples of social security in the world. Despite what La Caja’s beneficiaries have been told by government officials, this deterioration has not been contained.
This is of public interest insofar as it takes a detailed look at the failures that have transformed social security in Costa Rica into a dubious model of care. La Caja is far from being safe; it is still being held hostage by the antagonistic forces that ignited a crisis in 2011. Still, the film identifies the corrective elements that could easily bring La Caja out from the danger zone.”
The documentary (Facebook page) is organized into six thematic segments. According to Professor Ortega, film production took about 14 months of part-time work. The documentary was produced by the Audiovisual Laboratory of Investigative Film Making at the UCR.
