Maria Full of Grace
by Joshua Marston
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Actor: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Orlando Tob?n, Virgina Ariza, Yenny Paola VegaDirector: Joshua Marston
Producer: Orlando Tob?n
Writer: Joshua Marston
Producer: Becky Glupczynski
Producer: Gigia Jaramillo
Producer: Jaime Osorio G?mez
Producer: Paul S. Mezey
Producer: Rodrigo Guerrero
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Hbo Home Video
DVD Reviews of Maria Full of Grace
DVD Review: "If you don't do this well, we'll stop right now..."
Summary: 5 Stars
Stopping isn't an option, really.
Maria has a problem: she finds it difficult to conform to stupid conventions. But she ends up making a terribly wrong choice in her desperation to get out of the rut she is in. She's given the feeling that it's about easy money. Once she has made that wrong choice, she finds herself in situations which she wasn't warned about.
Having gone through the reviews, I find come common complaints in the negative ones: that it's like a documentary, that critics are partial to foreign films, that there's no story.
The fact is that this is a simple and moving tale, and it's told well, without fireworks. Apart from Catalina Moreno's wonderful performance, I liked her interview in which she says, "It's not about the drugs, it's about the girl". Equally important, the core of the story can be very close to you, if you look around.
The one problem is that some of the characters are a bit cheesy, like the gangsters in New York. For me, that didn't really dent the gracefulness of the movie much.
DVD Review: Outstanding
Summary: 5 Stars
A PC movie that is actually good, for once. The phenomenon of drug 'mules' from places like Colombia probably doesn't get enough attention. I imagine this is still going on every day. This film shows the difficult lives of immigrants, as well as the cheapness of life in places where it's difficult to earn money. The focus is narrow here, but that's an asset to the filmmaking. DVD Review: Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
Pleased with movie. It arrived quickly and was in excellent shape. Thanks amazon.DVD Review: Absorbing Drama
Summary: 4 Stars
Maria Full of Grace" is an absorbing drama that telescopes a singular component of the supply-side of immigrant drug-running. It shows how destitute young women from poor countries like Columbia are lured into becoming "mules"--illegal importers of high-value drugs like cocaine and heroin into the United States--with (often false) promises of instant wealth and relative safety. As such, the 17-year-old Maria (played by Catalino Moreno) is the flawless prototype. She's a poor, ill-educated assembly-line worker who is also her family's main breadwinner. Maria is clearly smart and intuitive but, saddled with an unplanned pregnancy, she's also a bit feisty and somewhat sullen, longing to escape the dullness and drudgery of her Colombian village. "Grace" revolves around Maria's decision to join the drug-running trade--for the lack of other viable options--and her efforts to avoid detection (after having ingested 30 or more pellets of drugs) by US Customs, outlast the middlemen, and find a way to survive the strange urban jungle that is New York. The film effectively communicates the social and economic desperation that often drives such women to risk life and liberty for a relatively small return. It also depicts the callousness and the (sometimes deadly) indifference of the middle-men who chaperone the girls and ensure--by whatever means necessary-- that they deliver the goods. What holds this truncated film together is Moreno's fragile yet hard-edged affect. Director Joshua Marston's economy of style is well-matched by Moreno's performance. She's a stunning, dark-eyed beauty, whose young-old face alone tells Maria's story. Her Maria is defiant yet quietly desperate, bold yet cautious, na?ve but distrustful--she immediately pulls us in and makes us care about this girl-woman's fate. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles. DVD Review: outstanding docufiction
Summary: 5 Stars
When you get really tired of watching the same old Hollywood drivel about rich people and all of their petty problems, check out this film. It helps us to have some sense of the reality of the Third World, which is part of our world, whether Hollywood wants us to remember and think about social realities or not. This movie is good for the soul and the social conscience.
Description of Maria Full of Grace
(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.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
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