FILMMAKER CONVEYS TRUTH WITH FICTION

Joshua Marston burst onto the film scene as a screenwriter and
director with Maria Full of Grace, winner of the 2004 Sundance Film
Festival Audience Award, among others. Julie Ginsberg picked his brain
while his film played at UNFPA's International Film Festival.

Inner Sanctum: I saw that you completed a Master's Degree in political
science before attending New York University film school. Would you say
that you have political goals with your films?

Yeah, there's no question that the work that I did in political
science has informed the filmmaking that I'm interested in, and for me
it's always been a question of finding some middle ground where I can
be creative and also do something which has some relationship or
bearing on the world that we live in. So I'm interested in telling
stories, fictional stories that are personal but that are told in a
context that has some larger social or political relevance. For
example, the story of Maria Full of Grace is one girl's story, but it
gives you a sense of the larger world of drug trafficking and
immigration.

Inner Sanctum: Is that a topic that interests you politically?

Yeah, I had been interested in the drug war and the politics of the
drug war before I made Maria Full of Grace. I have my own politics
about the drug war and the failure, specifically of US policy, in
combating drugs. I coincidentally met a woman who had been a drug
mule, and over the course of sitting opposite her in a Colombian
restaurant in Queens, she told me the story of how she'd come to the
US. It was a very compelling story, and because I already had this
interest in the drug war, I decided it would be a very interesting way
to do something about it, a personal way in to a story about the drug
war, rather than making a documentary about the drug war.

Inner Sanctum: To what extent is Maria's story consistent with what she
told you?

It's consistent only in the basic outline. That was the first of many
stories that I ended up hearing about the drug world... I then went on
to do a lot of interviews with other people who had been drug mules,
both in prisons in the US and also prisons in South America.

There were two components of the research that I was doing for the
film. There was the research that related to drug trafficking, which
was a very technical investigation but in some respects not that
complicated... The details of how one goes about smuggling drugs, how
the pellets are prepared, how big they are, all that is very concrete
and objective and in some respects very straightforward. The more
difficult research was to understand what its like to be a 17-year-old
girl from Colombia because I've never been a 17-year-old girl from
Colombia, so that was a whole other side of the research that was
about spending time in small towns in Colombia and also hanging out in
the Colombian section of Queens and getting to know people and
listening to people's stories.

Inner Sanctum: Do you have any personal connections to Latin America or
to Colombia in particular?

I didn't before I made the film; I certainly do now.

Inner Sanctum: So how would you hope that the audience would respond to
Maria Full of Grace?

I think there's a frequent misperception about drug mules, drug
traffickers, and that is that they are criminals, and they deserve to
be locked up and put in jail. There is no question that we need to
have laws, and when people break the laws they need to be punished,
but the problem is that when you demonise and criminalise drug
trafficking to such an extent, you too easily fool yourself into
thinking that criminal solutions are going to solve the problem, when
in fact, drug trafficking is a social problem, it's a humanitarian
problem and it's a public health problem.

So my hope is that the film works against this tendency to demonise
drug mules by telling a story that's from the point of view of a drug
mule so you put yourself in the position of this one drug mule, and
you understand that Maria is not a drug mule but rather a young woman,
who has all these problems in her life, and you begin to sympathise
and empathise with why she's making this choice.

Inner Sanctum: So what's your next project or area of interest?

I'm working on a film about Iraq. It's the story of an American truck
driver working in Iraq as a private contractor for a Halliburton-type
company. It's about the contrast of being an American truck driver
who's never ever been outside of the US suddenly being sent to the
middle of Iraq.

Inner Sanctum: What other human rights issues are on your agenda or are
strongly important to you?

I guess I don't think of the world in terms of human rights agendas;
one of the things that I'm most interested in is cross-cultural
understanding and misunderstanding. And unfortunately I think that
misunderstanding motivates a lot of foreign policy failures in the
world today. For example, I think that a lot of the problems related
to the American presence in Iraq stem from a complete and utter lack
of understanding of Iraqi culture on the part of Americans.

So for me, in the same way that filmmaking is an opportunity to play
anthropologist and try and get to know other people's stories, it also
becomes an opportunity to introduce the audience to a world they don't
know, thereby creating a certain bridge and giving people an
understanding that they might not otherwise have.

Inner Sanctum: What do you think has been the impact of the experience
of making the film on the Colombian actors?

It's changed a lot of their lives, in ways that I never would have
imagined. Most importantly, Catalina's life. When I met her she was a
third year student in university studying advertising with no real
hope of becoming a professional actress, and now she's in New York,
pursuing acting on a professional level.

Inner Sanctum: Did you run into any backlash?

We didn't run into any backlash. I would say unfortunately because in
Colombia drug mules are so inconsequential and of so little concern
that no one in Colombia really had very much interest or worry about
an American making a movie on the subject.

Inner Sanctum: In what ways do you feel that the story of the film was
personal?

I started working on it from a very external interest, a political
interest, and I spent a fair bit of time worrying about whether or not
I was the right person to tell this story and how I was going to get
inside the story. It wasn't until I had written a couple of drafts of
the script that I suddenly realised that I was on a deeper level
making a story about a young woman who was trying to figure out her
place in the world. The writing process is always one of discovery,
and that was a light bulb moment.

Inner Sanctum: Is there anything else that you'd like to include?

Only that I'm extremely happy to be here in Viet Nam and very much
anticipating the Vietnamese reaction. I hope that the film can in some
way raise awareness about the plight of migrants, particularly women,
who are crossing borders in order to try and better their lives and
better the lives of their families.