Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6551 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-12-07
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

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

From The New Yorker
In this superbly poised independent film, Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a willful seventeen-year-old, unhappily pregnant and stuck in a factory job, agrees to serve as a "mule," carrying in her stomach little pellets of heroin from her native Colombia to New Jersey. Joshua Marston, a thirty-five-year-old N.Y.U. film-school graduate, nosed around Colombia and New York's immigrant neighborhoods before beginning to shoot "Maria," his first full-length feature, and the way he dramatized the material seems instinctively right: he goes step by step, detail by detail, emotion by emotion, eliding nothing, exaggerating nothing. When Maria swallows the pellets in Bogotá, for example, Marston doesn't emphasize the sardonic associations with sexual and religious rituals. He also expects us to understand that the exploitation of women is merely one aspect of the cruelty of a society corrupted by drugs. In his calm and lucid way, he has made one of the emblematic coming-to-America stories of our time. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Sometimes reality is the toughest pill to swallow...
I got into a heated debate with a friend the other day about the difference between subtlety and lifelessness. He got all up in arms when I labeled Ed Harris's nomination for `The Truman Show' a joke. Now as many of you know, I love the movie, but I felt that Harris really added nothing to the film. He was less subtle and more hollow. So, when he said that I wouldn't appreciate subtleness if it hit me in the face I rattled off this little film and told him to bask in the glory that is Catalina Sandino Moreno and her brilliant use of subtle forcefulness. So, we watched the film together, and my adoration of her performance was deepened and I think I made my point.

This performance may be quiet, but it is in no way shape or form `hollow'.

`Maria, Llena Eres de Gracia' is a brilliant film, truly, from start to finish one of the most honest and raw films I have seen in recent years. The film feels so natural, which only adds to the emotional destruction the audience goes through while watching it. There is nothing that feels Hollywoodized or embellished in that overly dramatic heavy handed way that most films are done today. It is simply raw and gritty and truth; pure truth.

Here we are told the story of young Maria, a seventeen-year-old Columbian who lives with her mother and grandmother, her sister and her young nephew. She works hard every day dethroning flowers only to pay more than her share at home. When Maria winds up pregnant she is faced with a decision. Her boyfriend isn't the marrying type, and her job is less that satisfactory so she decides to leave town and try to find work elsewhere. That is when she is given the opportunity to make some quick and `easy' money. She is asked to become a mule, swallowing pellets of heroine and smuggling them into the states. She accepts, and her harrowing journey is one of danger, fear and ultimately self awakening.

The film, much like Moreno, is very subtle. There is nothing here that is over-the-top or any mere scene that begs for your attention the way that most films produced today do. The story is told in a very focused yet very earnest way. We see everything (almost everything) in a very point-blank manor. Nothing is glamorized, nothing is sugar-coated; nothing is depicted as anything other than reality. I think I first realized this when Maria has to wash off pellets after she went to the bathroom and then re-swallow them in the airplane bathroom.

Fearless.

I want to take a minute to applaud the Academy for nominating Moreno back in 2004 for Best Lead Actress. I often give the Academy a hard time for nominating gimmicky and obvious performances that take no imagination and really require no stretch of talent, but in 2004 they nominated five VERY worthy performances (albeit handing possibly the least worthy the award). Catalina Sandino Moreno delivers such a spellbindingly pure performance, never reaching too far and coming off as forced but always keeping her characters innocence and naivety a central part of her performance. Maria is sincere and genuine, yet confused and determined. This reads beautifully on the screen. She is gives such a radiant performance, one that is nuanced to perfection and such a dynamic force without being abrupt and outlandish.

First time actress Moreno (yes, this is her DEBUT performance) and newcomer writer/director Joshua Marston (he had one credit under his belt before this) are a brilliant team who mesh so well with one another to create a film that reaches the heart and stirs the emotions and will remain utterly unforgettable. Watching Maria grow as a person throughout this treacherous journey may be hard to take, but in the end the reward is beautiful beyond words.

Making Human Beings into Drug Mules
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 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.