Maria Full of Grace

Released 2004
Stars Catalina 2004Sandino Moreno, Yenny Paola Vega, Guilied Lopez, Patricia Rae, Orlando Tobon, John Álex Toro
Directed by Joshua Marston

Maria Full of Grace is the harrowing story of an atypical drug-running "mule." Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno, whose portrayal earned her an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead) is a smart, independent 17-year-old girl from Colombia who agrees to smuggle a half-kilo of heroin into the United States for a shot at a normal existence in the magical land of "El Norte" -- where she imagines the city streets must be paved with gold.

Summary by http://www.netflix.com

I always enjoy watching other people at work so I can get a glimpse of what it would be like to do other jobs, and in this movie we see the characters performing two jobs. One is working as a packager of roses on a flower plantation, and the other is as a drug mule. If you watch this movie, the next time you buy or receive flowers you'll be reminded of the opening scenes, which show the characters dethorning roses and packaging them. It's a typical manual labor job, and it's not a bad one. I'm sure it's grueling doing that work all day long, but it's probably better than most manual labor. The second job, on the other hand, packs more intense grueling moments into a few days of work than several months at the plantation. It's pretty fascinating to see how the whole mule process works, and I can see why some people would take the chance. One thing I really liked about this movie was the fact that the girls who decided to become mules weren't desperate runaways who had no alternative. They were lower middle-class Colombian girls who had alternatives but were seduced by the promise of fast easy money and the chance to escape their boredom. True, Maria was pregnant, but she had alternatives.

I would call this movie more interesting than harrowing. The only harrowing moment for me was when she had to reswallow the pellets in the airplane bathroom. That was pretty awful. At that point, I would have said you can take it out of my pay, but one pellet was probably worth more than what she was paid. So it probably wasn't an option, but I don't see how I could have done it.

It's movies like this that give independent film a good name. It looks gorgeous and takes us into several new worlds that I haven't seen. The story is predictable, but that's kind of a good thing here because it doesn't resort to a Hollywood plot twist or a pumped up dramatic resolution. Instead, the whole movie just feels like real life as we get glimpses into life in Colombia as well as a Colombian neighborhood in New Jersey. We also see the travails and dangers of being a drug mule, and I suppose it has convinced me to scratch that off my list of my life's ambitions. --Bill Alward, January 17, 2006