Description: (Drama) Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino), a bright, spirited 17-year old, lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia. Desperate to leave her job stripping thorns from flowers in a rose plantation, Maria accepts a lucrative offer to transport packets of heroin-which she must swallow-to the United States. The ruthless world of international drug trafficking proves to be more than Maria bargained for as she becomes ultimately entangled with both drug cartels and immigration officials. The dramatic thriller builds toward a conclusion so powerful and revealing it could only be based on a thousand true stories.
Amazon.com: When a movie can blend passionate social concern with good old-fashioned suspense, it must be doing something right. Maria Full of Grace scores high on both counts. Maria is a Colombian teenager who, for a large paycheck, agrees to be a mule for drug-runners: she has to swallow dozens of thumb-sized capsules of heroin and smuggle them into New York. This debilitating process is painstakingly described, and of course not everything goes as planned when Maria and her fellow mules land in America. Director Joshua Marston is working on a low budget, which explains the film's narrow, single-minded focus--but this may be a strength, not a weakness. The trump card is the lead performance of Catalina Sandrino Moreno, who won awards at the Seattle and Newport Film Festivals. Her empathetic face carries us along on Maria's journey, and humanizes a problem that is too easily relegated to a headline. --Robert Horton
Wonderful film!! Wonderful movie with a great story that also sparked my husband and I to learn more about drug mules. Catalina Sandino Moreno does a WONDERFUL job as Maria. I speak Spanish but my husband does not, and he enjoyed watching it with subtitles, something he normally does not do. I speak "Spain Spanish" but have also worked with people from Columbia, Ecuador, Cuba, and Honduras.. if I hadn't worked with people from rural areas, I think it would have been hard for me to understand the dialects used. It's definitely what I call "street Spanish." But it is WONDERFUL, and the language gives a huge glimpse into Maria's life and culture.
An Indictment of More Than Drug Smugglers Painful and ugly, Maria Llena de Gracia is also a powerful experience of vicarious desperation and deprivation. The story of a village girl in Colombia whose family, novio, and job all fail her at the same moment. She rushes heedlessly into big trouble, which in Colombia can only mean the cocaine trade. Coke merchants and smugglers are not nice people; we know that, and to see this film as an indictment of their viciousness is only a fraction of the movie's content. It's also, and more importantly an indictment of the global economy, the Octopus of our era with far stronger tentacles than the railroad of the early 20th Century. The indictment is clear from the first scene of the movie, when ALL the young women of the community report for work through a high wire fence to the warehouse where roses are trimmed and wrapped for export to North America. There is no other work in the village, no subsistence, no options, no future. If it were in Mexico - and there are exactly the same horrible sweat-shops in NAFTAfied Mexico - one would have at least the option of illegal emigration to El Norte, but in Colombia, it's 'muling' drugs or maid service. Frankly, I doubt that many American viewers of this film really saw what it was about from the Colombian perspective. Stopping the drug traffic isn't just a matter of spraying lethal chemicals over the countryside or supplying arms and helicopters to the latifundistas who own the government, and it isn't just a matter of reducing demand from the two poles of American society - the marginalized Black and the overprivileged White - either. It's a matter of facilitating the recovery of a diverse local economy, in which most people can make a living and a few can even find opportunity without crime and violence.
The Spanish spoken in this film, by the way, is extremely hard to catch unless you've heard the rural dialects before. The "vos" forms are used throughout (vosotros in Spain, the second person plural) and slang is pervasive. Even my son, who went to public elementary school in Spain and who speaks like a native, had to have the English subtitles.
Excellent, excellent The plot seems no more than a mosaic of real life situations, the conclusion driven by most basic motives, known to be used since ancient Greek drama. The performance of Jaime Osorio Gomez as Javier is outstanding. With a short appearance he manages to dash the essence of the Latin American way: a continent brought to stress by forces too powerful to control has developed a societal and moral codex to live within. And we want Maria to stay in America, the land of the brave. The system works :).
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.
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.
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