'MARIA' DELIVERS HEROIN, DRUG-WAR INSIGHT

As a Colombian, and a sophisticated, big city college student,
Catalina Sandino Moreno had a pretty good idea what a drug mule was.
She'd seen the newspaper stories, watched the TV reports.

"Sometimes they're caught smuggling drugs to the United States," she
says. "They're jailed. They're bad people. It was a very superficial
portrait, and that's what I believed."

No more. Two years ago, Moreno, who was studying advertising at a
Bogota university but had long harbored a love of the theater,
auditioned for a film - to be made in Colombia, but written and
directed by an American, Joshua Marston.

Moreno landed the title role over 800-plus women - professional
actresses, students, laborers, Colombians living in the States. In the
devastatingly good Maria Full of Grace, she plays a poor country girl
who, desperate for money, agrees to ingest pellets of heroin, fly to
New York, and deliver them to a dealer. A strong-willed and
resourceful young woman, Moreno's character is not an evil criminal,
not a greedy drug runner. She's just a girl trying to find a way to
freedom.

"I had no idea of this whole aspect of the drug wars. Like, who are
they?" says the actress, in town recently, along with Marston. "But
when I read the script, the story of Maria, I saw it's a totally
different thing... . Now I could be a drug mule. I knew that the
person has to be in a very extreme situation just to think of doing
that. There is great desperation behind the decision for them to make
this trip. It's incredibly dangerous."

And it's not just the danger of being caught, it's the possibility
that one of the 60 or so rubber-wrapped pellets could break in the
carrier's stomach and result in death.

"I wouldn't say it's based on any one story," says Marston, 35, who
lives and works in New York. "But it's definitely inspired by a
conversation that I had with someone who had traveled as a mule... .
It was obviously a very compelling story, and I came to it at a point
where I was already very interested in Colombia. I had been following
news from Colombia for years, and had also been interested in the drug
wars, and wanted to do something on the drug war, and something on the
immigrant experience."

Ironically, after research trips to Bogota and scouting locations in
outlying villages, Marston and cast and crew were forced to shoot the
first half of the film in neighboring Ecuador. "It was just before the
presidential elections, and it got a little too heated up," he
explains. "There were bombs going off. It was impossible to get
production insurance."

The second half of the story takes place in New York, predominantly in
the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, also known as "Little Colombia."

Winner of the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January,
Maria Full of Grace - which opens Friday at the Ritz Theaters - is in
Spanish, which Marston speaks fluently, although he wrote the original
drafts in English.

"My Spanish wasn't colloquial enough that it made sense. Eventually, I
translated it with a Colombian friend into sort of neutral Spanish...
and it wasn't until I started working with the actors that the
language became very specific. There was a lot of improvisation. Some
of the best lines came from Catalina and the other actors, working
together."

After completing the film in late 2002, Moreno moved to New York. She
has an agent, she's been taking acting classes, and she's here to stay.

"I've been to Colombia a lot of times in the last two years, but I'm
staying in New York for work," she says. "I think New York's an
incredible city. Why should I go back to Colombia to study advertising
if I have this incredible movie and I have a lot of opportunities that
I didn't have in Colombia?"