FREE ON CINEGEEK.De Maria Full Of Grace 

I'm still quite impressed by Maria who works on the assembly line in Colombia: Maria is young and already and has fire! After she finds out that she is pregnant, the attitude of her loser friend Juan doesn't impress her at all. She throws her job away and goes to Bogota. There she meets a man who tells Maria that she could earn a lot of money as a "mule", as a drug courier with dozens of small packets of cocaine in her stomach... Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is exploited by the drug business, but she herself sees this as an opportunity. Her best friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega) wants to accompany her. They get valuable tips from Lucy (Giulied Lopez), who has already done the job before. Lucy wants to come along to visit her sister in New York. At Kennedy Airport the girls immediately arouse suspicion, but Maria must not be x-rayed because she is pregnant. But Lucy feels sick; one of the packages bursts and she dies of an overdose. Two drug dealers "take care" of the girls and remove the dead body. For them this is nothing more than a business issue. Maria, who is a victim of economic poverty, does not feel at all as such. She has guts and is intelligent! Fortunately, the film saves us from the usual clichés about drug cartels and during Maria's operation we don't experience the deepest evil, but a group of rather incompetent guys. A drug movie without machine guns and chases, but with a development story. In the center: Catalina Sandino Moreno, an actress with glowing eyes and a lot of charisma! Maria Full Of Grace was made by the US debutant Joshua Marston with little means. He discovered the non-actress and cast her alongside other non-professionals. His film radiates this freshness and urgency, which wants to say: Life happens here and now! Maria simply takes the world as it is and tries to survive in it. Her most important decision: she sets off in search of the sister of the dead Lucy... Marston made a film that understands people's poverty without succumbing to the temptation to romanticize it. He points out that the "bad" things arise through the system of economy - not because they are the responsibility of "villains". It is not enough to kill the "villain" and everything becomes "good" again - because this villain does not exist. Maria Full Of Grace is extraordinary in several ways: On the one hand, because the film dares to show whole ordinary circumstances. What we see here is simply everyday life with plausible motives and understandable decisions. We experience characters at the subsistence level. The two middlemen who receive the girls: Basically they are also quite normal. They act corruptly and cruelly, which doesn't mean that we are dealing with "villains" here. Secondly, Maria Full Of Grace (unlike most drug movies) dares to do without glamorous stars and expensive effects. This is a world that exists below the radar and in which it's all about girls like Maria or Lucy hopefully surviving their flight!