Dubby Bhagat

Kathmandu:

The world gives convenient labels to these places — Least Developed Countries, Rogue States, etc. and then more or less forgets about them. ‘Maria Full Of Grace’ humanises a country and a few people in it. The country is Columbia and one of the people is Maria. Film writer Robert Horton says, “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 or carrier for drug-runners: she has to swallow dozens of thumbsized capsules of heroin and smuggle them into New York.” Director Joshua Marston worked on a budget that was tight, so the movie is focused which is a strength. The camera hones on only that which is essential. The center of the movie is Maria played by Catalina Sandrino Moreno who won awards including and Oscar nomination as Best Actress.

Said Moreno, “Someone told my mother about the film. I was doing theater, but only on the side. At that point the movie was more gossip than anything else. People were saying, ‘Why is an American here, trying to make a movie about Colombia?’ I just went to find out.”

Says Joshua Marston, “After I first saw Catalina I said, ‘We’re going to make her a star,’ We didn’t make her a star, of course. She made herself a star. Since doing the film, Catalina, in a way, has discovered herself.” ‘Maria Full Of Grace’ begins in Colombia with her doing a thankless job, in a nowhere relationship with a boy and prey to a parasitic family which combines to drive her to carry heroin alongside a baby in her stomach, to America which is a mythological place of perfection for her friends.

The USD 5,000 she will earn carrying sixty rubber pellets to New York represents a chance at happiness for her. Joshua Marston says, “It’s telling the story from the bottom up, from the point of view of the little person of the person who gets sucked into it, who is swallowing drugs and carrying them on a plane.” The second half of a film is set in New York where things go wrong and Maria, despite the fact that at times she does terrible things, seems to be untouched by the sordidness of Columbia, New York, drug trafficking and the tragedies that beset her because she finds joy in the fact that she is pregnant. One beautiful scene has her viewing her yet to be born baby at a doctor’s clinic and she seems to find happiness and a purpose beyond what she is doing in life.

Says Joshua Marston, “The point of the film was to think about who is a drug mule and what is that leads someone to that incredibly risky decision. The whole idea was to humanise that individual and have sympathy so we can understand that drug problem isn’t just a military and criminal problem, it’s also a human, social and economic problem.” At the end of the movie Maria has a moment of epiphany at an airport and her life, we feel is about to change, hopefully for the better. Said Joshua Marston, “The grace in the title is about the girl on a journey to discover her own grace. That grace comes come within both literally and metaphorically.” Maria story of trafficking should strike an empathetic chord in Nepal or in any country where economics leads to exploitation of the grace.