Maria Full of Grace (2003)

Painful to watch...

Maria Alvarez, 17 years old, lives with her Mother, sister and her infants in a tenement apartment building in a small rural town outside of Bogota in Colombia. Maria works in flower factory in Colombia where she removes thorns and leaves from the stems of roses readying them for export shipments. Her boss refuses to let her go to the bathroom a third time during her shift - Maria vomits on the roses as she is getting scolded. Her boss makes her wash down and clean the roses and charges her for the loss time. Maria refuses to take this treatment and quits. Her family is aghast as there are few well paying jobs available and they need her income to eke out their survival. Maria then learns that she is pregnant - and concludes that her boyfriend does not love her - nor does she love him. She leaves him and her family to become a narcotics "mule" carrying heroine to the United States. Maria learns first hand of the enormous personal risks involved in this occupation.

While this was not a true story, the film visually depicts the risks that humans will take to escape poverty, graft, hopelessness for a better life for themselves and their families. It is unbearably painful to watch in certain scenes...and unforgettable as a result.

May 26, 2008

Painful, Raw, Thought-Provoking

I've hesitated to rent Maria Full of Grace. Do I really want to immerse myself into the heartbreaking world of drug mules? Finally, I grabbed it and sat down to watch. On several levels Maria may be the most disturbing film I've ever seen. A young girl faced with a future that leaves her feeling hopeless. Her boyfriend, selfish, young, more interested in drinking and his friends than her, offers her freedom from her life of working to help out the family. But would life with him be any more like life than the one she so wants to escape. Her job, menial, difficult and the only one out there, wears her down, especially when she has to contribute to the care and upkeep of her selfish sister and small nephew.

A new guy heads into town, dances with her, opens up some possibilities of life that is more than mere existing. So she jumps at the challenge and opportunity that he dangles over her. Unfortunately the challenge is swallowing pellets full of drugs and the opportunity is traveling to America to spend time in a cramped hotel room waiting while her body expels 62 pellets.

The trip goes bad in a horrific way, and Maria is left to fend for herself in New York City. Maria has to come to some heavy decisions regarding future. Everything has changed and she will never be the teenager she was.

Aside from the horror of the situation, the film is well done and compelling. In Spanish with English subtitles with realistic dialogue peppered with the F-word. Those who like documentaries, historically accurate films, crossroads moments and raw storytelling should find Maria to be a thought provoking movie. March 31, 2008

Intelligent, thought-provoking film

In MARIA FULL OF GRACE, Joshua Marsten has created a fascinating, thought provoking film about the some of the unbelievable aspects of the drug trade, and the rather normal people who get caught-up in it.

Maria Alvarez is a 17 years old in Bogota, Columbia, who is pregnant, stuck with a loser boyfriend and a dead-end job in the rose industry. She jumps at a chance for adventure, and a chance to get more money than she would make in years, and agrees to become a drug mule, or a person who swallows drug pellets and transports them to the US.

We watch with horror and fascination as to how the pellets are prepared, and how Maria finds herself swallowing 62 of those pellets (swallowing 1 is not easy - its akin to swallowing those huge grapes in one big swallow - no biting and chewing allowed!) Her adventure has hardly just begun, as she then has fly with the pellets to New York, avoid the scrutiny of fellow passengers (for not eating - as her stomach is packed with drugs) make it through immigration, and finally 'hand over' her drugs to local drug pushers. If one pellet even slightly breaks inside her, she faces certain death. On top of all this, she has to learn to navigate a in foreign country in which she does not know the language or customs.

As other reviewers have said, this film is very well acted. Catalina Sandino Moreno earned a well deserved Oscar for her performance; her co-actresses and actors did a fantastic job as well. The pacing is fantastic: the best part of the film was the airplane and customs scene. I felt like I was watching a cross between a documentary and a thrilling action film- the suspense was unbelievable: would Maria make it through the plane ride with drugs intact? Would the Customs Officers catch her? What would happen if she was caught?

This is one of the more most thought provoking films I have seen in a long time, as Marsten has created an intelligent film which does fall prey to stereotyping. Maria is no angel. I felt torn about her character: while admiring Maria for her strength and intelligence, I also felt that her actions were morally reprehensible, as she actively chooses to become a part of a drug trade that has destroyed the lives of so many. Marsten makes it clear that her life in Columbia really was not that bad - she was more bored and adventure seeking than poor and desperate. Marsten's Maria is strong and smart, but clearly also a bit selfish - all in all, a normal person with strengths and faults.

Speaking of breaking stereotypes, Marsten gives insightful portrayals of life in Columbia (we see Maria's family is a bit short on cash, but live in a cozy home, far from the ravages of the drug war) and life of the Columbian immigrant community in the New York (a colorful, tight, well-knit community looking out for one another, affected by the drug trade but hardly defined by it).

It is worth going through the extras, especially Marsten's voice-over during the film. Marsten offers amazing insights on drug mules and the drug trade (discovered through his research for the film), life in Columbia and the US for Colombians and Columbian immigrants, and his thought processes and events in creating the film, casting it, and designing and editing it. March 21, 2008

Incredible debut performance.

Catalina's performance is Brilliant ,she is so Believable ,she IS Maria ,the movie is somewhat predictable ,but it's the Human experience that makes it so compelling ,the Sheer hopelessness of her Life ,and the way she handles her difficulties is admirable and as a former immigrant myself I loved the ending .
February 6, 2008

heroin as eucharist

Maria Alvarez is a spunky seventeen-year-old trapped in a small village in Colombia. When her boss threatens her she quits her job de-thorning roses at a plantation (for shipment to Costco?!), even though this spells economic disaster for her family. She bags her boyfriend Juan who's a loser, even though he got her pregnant and wants to marry. Then a "friend" advises her that she can make unheard of money as a "mule" who swallows packets of heroin and delivers them by stomach to New York City. The allure of money and adventure is too much, so Maria, her best friend Blanca, and a seasoned mule named Lucy, learn how to swallow 50-60 packets without gagging and find themselves on the next flight to the Big Apple. We're not surprised when custom agents grill Maria upon landing, or that a packet bursts in Lucy's stomach, but these are only the beginnings of bad outcomes for all. The power of this film include its understated tone and the realization that it's based upon way too many true stories. In Spanish with English subtitles. January 7, 2008

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