MARIA FULL OF GRACE

Heroin Chica

Maria Full of Grace's director and star on America, Colombia and the cost
of authenticity

In the opening scene of Maria Full of Grace, Maria, a 17-year-old girl, is
frenching her boyfriend Juan up against the side of a building in a poor
Colombian neighbourhood. It's the kind of hungry, whole-mouth tongue kiss
that you're supposed to really get into while you're doing it, and Juan is
certainly up for it. "Let's go to your place," he whispers in Maria's ear,
and kisses her neck.

But Maria has her face turned upward, staring into the blue sky and up a
ladder to the roof of the building she wants to climb. She has bigger,
better things in mind.

Soon after, Maria's bigger, better dreams find her on an illicit doctor's
pallet in a Bogota slum as a shady drug lord carefully manipulates 67 meaty
pellets of heroin cased in plastic into her digestive tract. She's headed
on a plane to New York City. "Remember, if one of these pellets breaks, you
die," she's reminded on more than one occasion. But for Maria, who has
rebelliously quit her life as a flower-plantation drone and who is pregnant
by Juan (whom she does not love), becoming a drug mule seems like the
quickest, and only, way to a new life. In the film, told entirely from
Maria's point of view, her plan makes sense.

Maria Full of Grace is both like and unlike Traffic and other trenchant
war-on-drugs blockbuster investigations that came before it. It is similar
in the sense that we get a fully panoramic window into one, less familiar
perspective on the drug war: someone in a desperate situation, for whom the
stateside saleability of narcotics is her ticket to redemption. Different,
because this is fully Maria's story.

First-time writer-director Joshua Marston, a former social sciences student
in California, was inspired to write the first draft of Maria after talking
to an acquaintance that had swallowed drugs. "It was something I had only
heard about in urban legends. But hearing the story firsthand, it seemed
like a really compelling drama," he told Hour.

Though Maria's tagline reads "Based on 1,000 true stories," Marston
rigorously sticks to the protagonist's point of view, resisting the urge to
generalize or politicize her situation more than Maria herself would. She
sits on her flight, tries not to pass the pellets in the airplane bathroom,
and escapes from a Queens hotel room after one of her co-mules ends up dead
in the bathtub. This makes for gripping, tense cinema that's almost verite.

"I discovered in the rewriting process that I was taking out all this
background info I had gleaned about the drug war," he says. "I kept
rewriting Maria and I wanted to stay true to her point of view, so I
started taking out anything that I couldn't imagine her hearing, seeing and
doing."

Authenticity was an issue: The film, which is one of the first HBO-funded
features to make it to theatrical release (last summer's American Splendor
was another), is proclaimed to be an American-Colombian co-production.
Though the money and the director are American, the entire cast and crew
are from Colombia. For safety's sake, however, the film was shot in Ecuador.

"The process of making this film was riddled with doubt and uncertainty and
it was a harrowing process to construct this kind of narrative," Marston
recalls. "There was a time I was thinking of forgoing the HBO financing
because of not being able to shoot in Colombia [because of security
reasons], and my family worried that I was just being stubborn and
idiotic... I didn't want to waste my time and energy making something that
I cringe to show, felt fake and untrue."

So he didn't really interview 1,000 Colombian girls about their experiences
as drug mules?

"No," he says, laughing. "That's a marketing thing; the point they're
trying to make is that this happens every day, and has happened to
thousands of desperate Colombians. This wasn't a sociology project, though
I did spend a lot of time down in Colombia talking to people, of course,
and had visited the flower plants and the neighbourhoods to understand how
people lived."

The casting of Maria, the movie's heart and soul, was a giant undertaking:
The filmmakers saw 800 girls, from actual flower-plantation workers to
Colombian soap-opera starlets. Finally they had to push back production
while they combed the country for possible Marias, until they finally found
Catalina Sandino Moreno, a 23-year-old marketing student from Bogota.

"I knew I had to do a good job, because it was my first movie and such an
important one," Moreno told Hour. "I went to a flower plantation for two
weeks and I came to understand that the job was pretty crazy and hard, you
get fumigants in your eyes and skin and it's really hard work because you
have to stand up all the time. I can understand why Maria was bored and
miserable."

Now, Moreno has won best actress awards at the Berlin and Seattle film
festivals (and Maria won the audience award at Sundance). Like the pellets
in her character's stomach, Moreno's star turn in the film has helped her
to relocate to New York City.

"The Americans treat me really well, so in a way I have no complaints," she
says. "Politically speaking, this country and my country are not the best
of friends... I hope that movies like this one can help the name of
Colombia, and help Americans better understand what is happening in their
own country."

It seems, at this point, that the audience is indeed listening. In a summer
that started with the explosive success of Michael Moore's trenchant call
to American self-examination, Maria Full of Grace did more seats per screen
in New York and L.A. than another film that opened the same weekend, Will
Smith's I, Robot. Does Joshua Marston attribute Maria's early success to
frivolity fatigue - or an awakening election anxiety - in the American
multiplex?

"I think as a function of the war in Iraq, the drug war at home is not the
most salient issue at the moment; it's not the litmus test issue as
Americans are going to the polls, let's say. The war on terror seems to
have supplanted the focus on the war on drugs, but there are a lot of
commonalities between the two," he says.

"We have tried to [politicize] the film's release, we have reached out to
various drug reform groups and invited them to screenings, and they have
loved the film. It's been hard because Maria isn't overtly ideological and
bombastic... but someone wrote a very nice letter to the editor [in the New
York Times] that was really praising Maria, saying they hoped this movie
could be the Fahrenheit 9/11 for the drug war. And that would be fine with me."