Going to the movies is free tonight, and there’s no need to leave campus. The International House continues its Film Series with “Maria Full of Grace” at the Hodges Library Lindsay Young Auditorium. The screening will follow an introductory talk by Tatiana Arian, a native of Colombia and graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. The talk will start at 7 p.m.
The film has won the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival as well as two other respected awards at the Berlin Film Festival. Catalina Sandino Moreno, the lead protagonist, scored an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actress. She won Best Promising Performer from the Chicago Film Critics Association Awards. The movie received a host of other honors, as well, including Best Foreign Language Film at the Seattle Film Critics Awards.
Moreno plays Maria Alvarez, a 17-year-old working with roses. Her job is stripping thorns. Her job and life within a tiny home shared by three generations of her family give her the willingness to try a new line of work that promises travel and freedom. Her untimely pregnancy may also have something to do with it.
But Maria ends up trafficking drugs by swallowing packets of heroin and must determine to survive in a world of unrivaled perils. She must find a way out before it is too late.
Joshua Marston made the film. He said of his technique on the movie’s Web site (http://www.mariafullofgrace.com), “As a filmmaker, my approach is to reach outward and find compelling people, places and stories, and then, to listen.”
He said his “anthropological focus” is how he got into filmmaking and why he tells stories. Marston, speaking to Colombians in New York, found a woman who’d been arrested for trafficking as a drug mule — she swallowed capsules of heroin.
“It was a story that I hadn’t ever seen,” Marston said.
Speaking with drug mules in jail and airport security, he learned that a person could carry one kilo of heroin or cocaine in his or her body. He even interviewed a surgeon who gets called on to save people who need the pellets to be surgically removed.
Marston also found a leader in the Colombian community, Orlando Tobon, who has helped drug mules — even if by transporting their bodies home for burial — from ages 17 to 82.
Tobon became an associate producer of the film, and he even acted in it as a character he inspired, Don Fernando.
“I thought it was a beautiful idea for people to see an authentic depiction of a drug mule’s situation — to see the human story,” Tobon said.
That is where most of Marston’s research went. He had to craft an authentic rural life based on interviews and then give Maria a personality that made sense. He said he played off the commonalties shared by all 17-year-olds.
“… We developed a script that was less and less about a drug mule and more and more about a young woman trying to break out and kick against a world that seemed to be pressing in on her, in order to achieve something more,” Marston said.
Arian said that most people have a misunderstanding about Colombia, and she plans to talk about the story of the country before it shows. She said most have a bad perception of Colombia.
“We have this stigma for being Colombian,” Arian said. “Your country is the one that wants the drugs.” She will try to clear some of bad impressions of the country and show that in some cases “the situation is improving.”
Students will have a chance to hear her impressions about the film, instead of being left to guess at how accurate it is. Students can learn more about real life in Columbia, not just about those who get caught in the drug trade.
The film is mostly in Spanish with English subtitles.
The film is now available on DVD and has been released by HBO Films and Fine Line Features.
