Pubdate: Thu, 05 Aug 2004
Source: Hour Magazine (CN QU)
Copyright: 2004, Communications Voir Inc.
Contact:  http://www.hour.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/971
Author: Melora Koepke

MARIA FULL OF GRACE

Heroin Chica

Maria Full of Grace's director and star on America, Colombia and the cost 
of authenticity

In the opening scene of Maria Full of Grace, Maria, a 17-year-old girl, is 
frenching her boyfriend Juan up against the side of a building in a poor 
Colombian neighbourhood. It's the kind of hungry, whole-mouth tongue kiss 
that you're supposed to really get into while you're doing it, and Juan is 
certainly up for it. "Let's go to your place," he whispers in Maria's ear, 
and kisses her neck.

But Maria has her face turned upward, staring into the blue sky and up a 
ladder to the roof of the building she wants to climb. She has bigger, 
better things in mind.

Soon after, Maria's bigger, better dreams find her on an illicit doctor's 
pallet in a Bogota slum as a shady drug lord carefully manipulates 67 meaty 
pellets of heroin cased in plastic into her digestive tract. She's headed 
on a plane to New York City. "Remember, if one of these pellets breaks, you 
die," she's reminded on more than one occasion. But for Maria, who has 
rebelliously quit her life as a flower-plantation drone and who is pregnant 
by Juan (whom she does not love), becoming a drug mule seems like the 
quickest, and only, way to a new life. In the film, told entirely from 
Maria's point of view, her plan makes sense.

Maria Full of Grace is both like and unlike Traffic and other trenchant 
war-on-drugs blockbuster investigations that came before it. It is similar 
in the sense that we get a fully panoramic window into one, less familiar 
perspective on the drug war: someone in a desperate situation, for whom the 
stateside saleability of narcotics is her ticket to redemption. Different, 
because this is fully Maria's story.

First-time writer-director Joshua Marston, a former social sciences student 
in California, was inspired to write the first draft of Maria after talking 
to an acquaintance that had swallowed drugs. "It was something I had only 
heard about in urban legends. But hearing the story firsthand, it seemed 
like a really compelling drama," he told Hour.

Though Maria's tagline reads "Based on 1,000 true stories," Marston 
rigorously sticks to the protagonist's point of view, resisting the urge to 
generalize or politicize her situation more than Maria herself would. She 
sits on her flight, tries not to pass the pellets in the airplane bathroom, 
and escapes from a Queens hotel room after one of her co-mules ends up dead 
in the bathtub. This makes for gripping, tense cinema that's almost verite.

"I discovered in the rewriting process that I was taking out all this 
background info I had gleaned about the drug war," he says. "I kept 
rewriting Maria and I wanted to stay true to her point of view, so I 
started taking out anything that I couldn't imagine her hearing, seeing and 
doing."

Authenticity was an issue: The film, which is one of the first HBO-funded 
features to make it to theatrical release (last summer's American Splendor 
was another), is proclaimed to be an American-Colombian co-production. 
Though the money and the director are American, the entire cast and crew 
are from Colombia. For safety's sake, however, the film was shot in Ecuador.

"The process of making this film was riddled with doubt and uncertainty and 
it was a harrowing process to construct this kind of narrative," Marston 
recalls. "There was a time I was thinking of forgoing the HBO financing 
because of not being able to shoot in Colombia [because of security 
reasons], and my family worried that I was just being stubborn and 
idiotic... I didn't want to waste my time and energy making something that 
I cringe to show, felt fake and untrue."

So he didn't really interview 1,000 Colombian girls about their experiences 
as drug mules?

"No," he says, laughing. "That's a marketing thing; the point they're 
trying to make is that this happens every day, and has happened to 
thousands of desperate Colombians. This wasn't a sociology project, though 
I did spend a lot of time down in Colombia talking to people, of course, 
and had visited the flower plants and the neighbourhoods to understand how 
people lived."

The casting of Maria, the movie's heart and soul, was a giant undertaking: 
The filmmakers saw 800 girls, from actual flower-plantation workers to 
Colombian soap-opera starlets. Finally they had to push back production 
while they combed the country for possible Marias, until they finally found 
Catalina Sandino Moreno, a 23-year-old marketing student from Bogota.

"I knew I had to do a good job, because it was my first movie and such an 
important one," Moreno told Hour. "I went to a flower plantation for two 
weeks and I came to understand that the job was pretty crazy and hard, you 
get fumigants in your eyes and skin and it's really hard work because you 
have to stand up all the time. I can understand why Maria was bored and 
miserable."

Now, Moreno has won best actress awards at the Berlin and Seattle film 
festivals (and Maria won the audience award at Sundance). Like the pellets 
in her character's stomach, Moreno's star turn in the film has helped her 
to relocate to New York City.

"The Americans treat me really well, so in a way I have no complaints," she 
says. "Politically speaking, this country and my country are not the best 
of friends... I hope that movies like this one can help the name of 
Colombia, and help Americans better understand what is happening in their 
own country."

It seems, at this point, that the audience is indeed listening. In a summer 
that started with the explosive success of Michael Moore's trenchant call 
to American self-examination, Maria Full of Grace did more seats per screen 
in New York and L.A. than another film that opened the same weekend, Will 
Smith's I, Robot. Does Joshua Marston attribute Maria's early success to 
frivolity fatigue - or an awakening election anxiety - in the American 
multiplex?

"I think as a function of the war in Iraq, the drug war at home is not the 
most salient issue at the moment; it's not the litmus test issue as 
Americans are going to the polls, let's say. The war on terror seems to 
have supplanted the focus on the war on drugs, but there are a lot of 
commonalities between the two," he says.

"We have tried to [politicize] the film's release, we have reached out to 
various drug reform groups and invited them to screenings, and they have 
loved the film. It's been hard because Maria isn't overtly ideological and 
bombastic... but someone wrote a very nice letter to the editor [in the New 
York Times] that was really praising Maria, saying they hoped this movie 
could be the Fahrenheit 9/11 for the drug war. And that would be fine with me."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart