Barnes & Noble

The film festival favorite Maria Full of Grace briefly played the art house circuit, but it figures to find its largest audience among discriminating DVD viewers. First-time director Joshua Marston doesn’t have an A-list personality playing his eponymous protagonist, but he doesn’t need one: Newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno is bright-eyed, beautiful, and charismatic in the role of a teenage Colombian who takes desperate chances to better both her own life and that of her unborn child. In her native land, Maria has a dead-end job and a loser boyfriend who accepts no responsibility for getting her pregnant. She agrees to become a “mule” for drug runners, swallowing dozens of tiny bags filled with cocaine just prior to flying to New York City, where members of the drug ring will shelter her until she expels the contraband. Airport customs investigators, we learn, generally suspect Colombians of smuggling drugs, but Maria is exempt from the usual X-ray investigation by virtue of her pregnancy. There is nothing especially unique or innovative about Maria’s narrative trajectory; indeed, most viewers will anticipate the plot developments before they occur. But Marston portrays the seedy milieu with near-documentary fidelity -- he neither overstates nor romanticizes the poverty that drives Maria to run the risk of spending her life in prison. Moreover, he presents the drug trade as a routine business operation, albeit one with occasionally deadly consequences. Supporting player Orlando Tobon even elicits a dollop of sympathy as an avuncular pusher who takes the mules under his wing when they arrive in New York. Yenny Vega is convincing as Maria’s loyal but dull-witted friend Blanca, although her real function is to make Moreno’s character look brighter. As for Moreno, her future couldn’t look better, as her performance here is among 2004’s very best. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

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

Entertainment Weekly

Unfolds with a simplicity that's as breathtaking as its inevitability is harrowing. Lisa Schwarzbaum

New York Times

Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing. Steven Holden

Washington Post

A story that rips fleshy holes through your heart. Desson Thomson

Product Details

• UPC: 026359192722
• Source: HBO HOME VIDEO
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby AC-3 Surround Sound
• Editions: Subtitled, Dubbed
• Time: 1:41:00
• Sales Rank: 8,982

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