A lawsuit alleging systemic failures that led to the starvation death of an 11-year-old girl at the hands of her adoptive family has resolved with settlements tallying $31.5 million dollars including $10 million each from the city and county of San Diego. The neglect lawsuit was brought on behalf of Arabella McCormack's two younger sisters, who were 6 and 7 years old when Arabella died in August 2022.
If the premise of director Eric Lin's feature debuts sounds bleak, that's because it is. Whether in the form of teachers, social services, or cultural shame, Rosemead highlights how external actors repeatedly fail Joe driven not by compassion, but by their own internalized fears, exposing the lengths to which institutions will go to protect themselves from those they deem dangerous.
Arguments about how we should consider some measure of accommodation (to fascism, to AI) abound, and some are even reasonable-sounding. These are powerful forces with their hands around the throat of our futures. Certainly no one can be blamed for doing what it takes to nudge those hands back a few millimeters so you can get enough air to breathe.
