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

(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.

A drug mule is a human being who agrees to, or is coerced into swallowing a large number of latex drug pellets filled with cocaine in order to smuggle the illicit narcotics into the United States. The movie tells how a group of women out of desperation become mules. It is a degrading, deeply dehumanizing, dangerous thing to do. If a pellet ruptures and the drugs get loose in the body, they can easily cause death. This small indie movie makes this experience human, tragic, and intimate to moviegoers. It carefully details the technique as the women practice swallowing whole grapes.
Maria, a beautiful, strong-willed woman chooses to be part of this very dangerous drug trafficking scheme. She is pregnant, terrified of being discovered, and feels trapped. She has lost her job in a fresh flower factory stripping the thorns and leaves off stems. The irony is that Colombia exports both flowers and cocaine. At one point Maria in New York passes a flower stand selling imported flowers.
The focus in this film is on women. It has good direction and fine acting. The ordinary scenes in Colombia and in New York City seem very authentic, realistic. The plight of these women is made very urgent and tragedy strikes in one case. It's a very affecting movie that documents the seriousness of this kind of crime that turns human beings into mules. Their bodies are used as containers, vessels in a vicious smuggling racket. Many will find it to be a devastating, instructive film.
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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.

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.

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 :).

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.