Speaking of 'Grace'

Back Stage West readers were treated to a special screening of Maria Full of Grace Dec. 8, followed by a discussion with the film's star, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and its writer/director Joshua Marston. This is Moreno's debut screen performance, and, according to the theatre-trained Colombian actor, she put much preparation into her character, a young Colombian woman who quits her small-town job to become a drug mule. Her research included spending two weeks on a flower plantation, the initial setting for her character. "I understood how hard their work is…. It's very monotonous," said Moreno. "And when you understand that, you relate to your character, and you respect your character and your character's decisions, even though they're not the best. You have a lot to work with. The other side of Maria was the drug thing, but then I realized that Maria didn't know anything about drugs, and neither did I. So it was like, 'Should I talk to people or shouldn't I?' It was a long conversation that I had with Josh about that. In the end, we decided that I should not."

As for what drew Marston into this world, the NYU film grad said he fell upon this story by chance. "I was interested in Colombia. I'd been reading the news about Colombia. I was aware of this civil war going on there. And I was also interested in the drug war and had my own political opinions about the drug war. I was one day in the Colombian neighborhood in New York and went into a restaurant and had lunch and met someone and got into a conversation with this woman…. In the course of that conversation, she revealed that she had been a drug mule and explained to me [about] swallowing grapes [as practice for ingesting heroine packets] and what the experience was like getting on an airplane. Aside from it being a very compelling story, I think one of the most profound things was to realize that this was real, that this woman sitting across from me had really done this, and that this really takes place on a daily basis. That feeling of realizing that it's real was very much what inspired me to want to make the film, to give that same feeling to the audience."