A Columbian Woman Becomes a Drug Mule

Winner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival and six awards at the Cartagena Film Festival, Joshua Marston's Maria Full Of Grace follows a bright, gutsy young woman on a life-changing - and life-threatening - journey.

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María Álvarez, a 17-year-old Colombian girl (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno), begins her odyssey working in sweat shop-like conditions at a flower plantation to help support her family.

After finding herself pregnant by a boyfriend whom she does not love, forced to bring in the money for her unemployed sister (a single mother) and being unjustly treated by her boss, she quits and decides to find another job, despite her family's vehement disapproval.

On her way to Bogotá to find the new job she wants, she gets offered a position as a mule — one who smuggles drugs by swallowing drug-filled pellets. Desperate, she accepts the risky offer, swallows 62 wrapped pellets of cocaine and flies to New York City.

After a close call at the US Customs (she was about to be X-rayed, until customs found out she was pregnant), she is set free and sent to a hotel where she is to remove the pellets from her body.

The traffickers arrive to take the drugs, and what happens next is something to be seen, not told. After seeing this ruthless world firsthand, Maria decides to escape the drug-trafficking cartel.

Her story becomes one of determination and survival like that of many other immigrants in the United States.