Pubdate: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 Source: Vietnam News (Vietnam) Column: Inner Sanctum Copyright: 2006 Viet Nam News Contact: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3935 Author: Julie Ginsberg Note: To learn more about Maria Full of Grace, or to view the trailer, visit the website http://www.mariafullofgrace.com Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Maria+Full+of+Grace FILMMAKER CONVEYS TRUTH WITH FICTION Joshua Marston burst onto the film scene as a screenwriter and director with Maria Full of Grace, winner of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, among others. Julie Ginsberg picked his brain while his film played at UNFPA's International Film Festival. Inner Sanctum: I saw that you completed a Master's Degree in political science before attending New York University film school. Would you say that you have political goals with your films? Yeah, there's no question that the work that I did in political science has informed the filmmaking that I'm interested in, and for me it's always been a question of finding some middle ground where I can be creative and also do something which has some relationship or bearing on the world that we live in. So I'm interested in telling stories, fictional stories that are personal but that are told in a context that has some larger social or political relevance. For example, the story of Maria Full of Grace is one girl's story, but it gives you a sense of the larger world of drug trafficking and immigration. Inner Sanctum: Is that a topic that interests you politically? Yeah, I had been interested in the drug war and the politics of the drug war before I made Maria Full of Grace. I have my own politics about the drug war and the failure, specifically of US policy, in combating drugs. I coincidentally met a woman who had been a drug mule, and over the course of sitting opposite her in a Colombian restaurant in Queens, she told me the story of how she'd come to the US. It was a very compelling story, and because I already had this interest in the drug war, I decided it would be a very interesting way to do something about it, a personal way in to a story about the drug war, rather than making a documentary about the drug war. Inner Sanctum: To what extent is Maria's story consistent with what she told you? It's consistent only in the basic outline. That was the first of many stories that I ended up hearing about the drug world... I then went on to do a lot of interviews with other people who had been drug mules, both in prisons in the US and also prisons in South America. There were two components of the research that I was doing for the film. There was the research that related to drug trafficking, which was a very technical investigation but in some respects not that complicated... The details of how one goes about smuggling drugs, how the pellets are prepared, how big they are, all that is very concrete and objective and in some respects very straightforward. The more difficult research was to understand what its like to be a 17-year-old girl from Colombia because I've never been a 17-year-old girl from Colombia, so that was a whole other side of the research that was about spending time in small towns in Colombia and also hanging out in the Colombian section of Queens and getting to know people and listening to people's stories. Inner Sanctum: Do you have any personal connections to Latin America or to Colombia in particular? I didn't before I made the film; I certainly do now. Inner Sanctum: So how would you hope that the audience would respond to Maria Full of Grace? I think there's a frequent misperception about drug mules, drug traffickers, and that is that they are criminals, and they deserve to be locked up and put in jail. There is no question that we need to have laws, and when people break the laws they need to be punished, but the problem is that when you demonise and criminalise drug trafficking to such an extent, you too easily fool yourself into thinking that criminal solutions are going to solve the problem, when in fact, drug trafficking is a social problem, it's a humanitarian problem and it's a public health problem. So my hope is that the film works against this tendency to demonise drug mules by telling a story that's from the point of view of a drug mule so you put yourself in the position of this one drug mule, and you understand that Maria is not a drug mule but rather a young woman, who has all these problems in her life, and you begin to sympathise and empathise with why she's making this choice. Inner Sanctum: So what's your next project or area of interest? I'm working on a film about Iraq. It's the story of an American truck driver working in Iraq as a private contractor for a Halliburton-type company. It's about the contrast of being an American truck driver who's never ever been outside of the US suddenly being sent to the middle of Iraq. Inner Sanctum: What other human rights issues are on your agenda or are strongly important to you? I guess I don't think of the world in terms of human rights agendas; one of the things that I'm most interested in is cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. And unfortunately I think that misunderstanding motivates a lot of foreign policy failures in the world today. For example, I think that a lot of the problems related to the American presence in Iraq stem from a complete and utter lack of understanding of Iraqi culture on the part of Americans. So for me, in the same way that filmmaking is an opportunity to play anthropologist and try and get to know other people's stories, it also becomes an opportunity to introduce the audience to a world they don't know, thereby creating a certain bridge and giving people an understanding that they might not otherwise have. Inner Sanctum: What do you think has been the impact of the experience of making the film on the Colombian actors? It's changed a lot of their lives, in ways that I never would have imagined. Most importantly, Catalina's life. When I met her she was a third year student in university studying advertising with no real hope of becoming a professional actress, and now she's in New York, pursuing acting on a professional level. Inner Sanctum: Did you run into any backlash? We didn't run into any backlash. I would say unfortunately because in Colombia drug mules are so inconsequential and of so little concern that no one in Colombia really had very much interest or worry about an American making a movie on the subject. Inner Sanctum: In what ways do you feel that the story of the film was personal? I started working on it from a very external interest, a political interest, and I spent a fair bit of time worrying about whether or not I was the right person to tell this story and how I was going to get inside the story. It wasn't until I had written a couple of drafts of the script that I suddenly realised that I was on a deeper level making a story about a young woman who was trying to figure out her place in the world. The writing process is always one of discovery, and that was a light bulb moment. Inner Sanctum: Is there anything else that you'd like to include? Only that I'm extremely happy to be here in Viet Nam and very much anticipating the Vietnamese reaction. I hope that the film can in some way raise awareness about the plight of migrants, particularly women, who are crossing borders in order to try and better their lives and better the lives of their families. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake