DRUG MULE'S STORY SUM OF MANY

Director went to Colombia for research

At N.Y. airport, he sat in on interrogations

Midway through Maria Full of Grace (reviewed on the facing page), Orlando
Tobon, a harried, kindly bear of a man, offers Maria and her friend leads on
under-the-table jobs as maids -- the only kind available to them, as illegal
Colombian immigrants lost in the perpetual churn of New York City.

It is the moment where verisimilitude spills over into fact. In the film,
Tobon is playing himself, as a self-styled fixer and tireless resource for
people in need within the Colombian community in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Though it's the one time that reality invades the fictional narrative, the
film teeters on that edge from beginning to end. For his first feature,
director Joshua Marston chose the perilous world of the Colombian drug mule,
those people who risk their lives to smuggle loads of illegal drugs in their
stomachs into the United States. The chilling story he creates is nothing if
not faithful to reality.

"I had a conversation with someone, by coincidence a Colombian, and this
person described what it was like to be a drug mule," Marston recalled
recently. "For me, it took on the status of urban legend. I had never
contemplated what it would be really like."

Marston, who had been working with a script on another aspect of the
Colombian drug trade, began his research by spending time in the South
American country, knitting together the many legends of the drug mules there
to build his script. The form the film would finally take, four years on,
was a natural one.

"It just developed out of the organic impulse for making the film, which was
one young woman's experience," Marston said. "And the process of developing
the script was one of constantly honing that experience, so that anything
that wasn't true to what she was seeing or hearing was slowly whittled
away."

That young woman of his creation is named Maria, a headstrong girl from
Colombia's flower-growing region. Upon learning she's pregnant by a useless
layabout who had been her boyfriend of convenience, she suddenly sees her
future laid out before her: a peasant single mother, barely scraping by,
having nothing, accomplishing nothing.

The notion is so bleak that she is enticed into making a single trip to New
York City, her stomach stuffed with heroin, precariously sealed in plastic
surgical gloves. The $5,000 (U.S.) she is being paid represents three years
pay at Colombia's average wage; it also represents a way out.

Throughout the film, the camera never leaves Maria, trailing her constantly
in understated, verite style, from the flower factory where she works, to
her home, where her mother, grandmother and sister, a single mother herself,
live in tight quarters. From there she is followed ultimately to Bogota,
into the room where she swallows 62 capsules of heroin, on to the plane, and
through a wild escape attempt into the streets of New York.

Marston assembled his narrative on the basis of interviews, legal documents,
and hours spent in U.S. Customs at Kennedy International Airport in New
York, where he was allowed to sit in on the questioning of suspected drug
mules. Tobon, too, was a resource. During his 35 years as the unofficial
"Mayor of Little Colombia," Tobon had repatriated the bodies of more than
400 drug mules who died in transit, usually when a heroin capsule burst in
their bellies.

But his film's focus never strays from Maria. "That made it that much more
compelling, from an emotional point of view," he said. "It was a way of
making sure that the film didn't become an ideological or political treatise
about the drug war. It was, first and foremost, an emotional story."

The film has garnered accolades in Colombia, where the government is
planning screenings to help educate Colombians about the dangers of muling.
It has made a difference in one direct instance that they know about.

"A young man called Orlando Tobon, out of the blue, to tell him he was
scheduled to be a drug mule. Everything was prepared. He had a ticket, and
was supposed to leave. And two days before, he went to a theatre in Bogota
and saw the film, and pulled out.

"He had gone to see the film three times, and believed it saved his life,"
Marston said. "There are few things more satisfying than that."