New York-based writer/director Joshua Marston makes his feature film debut with the coming-of-age drama Maria Full of Grace, with a script developed at the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab. Catalina Sandino Moreno plays Maria Alvarez, a teenager living in Bogotá, Colombia. Along with most of the other able-bodied people in her community, she works a perilous job in a flower plantation. She wants to quit, but her large family depends on her meager salary. One day, Maria meets a smooth-talking young
man named Franklin. He offers her a business proposition to make some money and travel. However, the task involves her acting as a drug mule and smuggling heroin into the U.S. Maria Full of Grace premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 as part of the dramatic competition. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
The fact that [Moreno's] Maria is so believable, so compelling, rests entirely on what she brings to the part, not what the part brings to her. Her face is the kind that can carry a movie on the strength of sheer screen presence.
Marston and Moreno make us stop and look, and to see Maria Alvarez as not just another face in the crowd but as an individual person, someone nice. Someone worth knowing.
One of those films that finds strength in its directness, that passes up the fireworks and cheap tricks and just goes straight for the starkness of a powerful situation.
The subject could be, and has been, exploitative in other films, but Joshua Marston shrewdly sketches asides of drama about whether Maria should simply remain in New York. To his credit, that outcome feels as fraught with peril as her drug-running.
the filmmaker's eye and ear for authentic detail and believable characterization...make the film an unusually tough and gritty slice of underworld life.
An original take on the drug trade, dealing with a seventeen year old girl (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who, pressured to find a job, agrees to become a drug mule, since the pay is good and it sounds like she will be taken care of. You don't know what to expect really after she agrees to take the job, and neither does
she. An overall incredible film with a powerful performance from Moreno (she got nominated for Best Actress). Although it loses a little steam in it's last half, this is a mostly excellent movie that feels authentic all the way through.
An impressive film which shows a realistic story based around drug muelling. Great performances all around, but particularly from Catalina Sandino Moreno who played the lead character.
A Drama which really pulls you in and see the circumstances from different viewpoints.
Definitely a recommendation ? an instant
favourite for me.
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