Too Young to Understand… Until I Did
NOVEMBER 21, 2009
“Grandma! Can I get this too?”
My grandma glanced at the box before exclaiming, “Yes! Of course honey.”
While walking out of the entertainment section of Walmart with New Super Mario Bros. Wii, I spotted a movie in the $5 Dollar Films bargain bin that had interested me ever since I’d first seen it advertised on HBO while my parents watched The Sopranos or The Wire. That film was Maria, Full of Grace.
Same grandmother who bought me my first physical music album ever at six years old, which was Hell Hath No Fury by Clipse, by the way.
Little 9-year-old me was oblivious though and had no idea how deep the content of this movie truly was.
Even after watching the film multiple times as a child, I couldn’t fully appreciate or contextualize the underlying commentary or issues that the film uses the characters and their predicaments to push across the message of why these women, or just Colombian, Spanish, or immigrants as a whole, do the things they do and the lengths they go to. I don’t think many other 9 or 10-year-old American children would be able to fully appreciate the film or its messaging either.
The commentary and messaging of Maria Full of Grace is very much on the nose and not difficult to understand or comprehend, I just don’t think it’s a movie that a child who hasn’t even entered their pre-teens yet can fully appreciate. Also, on the flip side, if you’re an adult with an enhanced knowledge of immigration, poverty, the war on drugs, and the profiteering motives involved in all of the previously mentioned things, it gives you an elevated appreciation for this film and makes this fictional story feel more like a documentary.
This film truly does a masterful job of telling the story that it does, and gets award winning or award nominated performances from both the people in front of and behind the camera. There are deeper reasons however that this story has endured for twenty-one years, reasons rooted in the film’s startling realism and the authenticity of the experiences it portrays.
Roots of Its Realism
While this is a fictional film, there are two major reasons why the story it tells feels so real. The first is the cast. Everyone delivers strong work, but Catalina Sandino Moreno, who plays Maria, completely commands the screen.
Sandino Moreno won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She was also nominated for Best Actress at the 77th Academy Awards. While this is most likely the best performance of Sandino Moreno’s career, it is also ironically enough the first film she ever starred in. Her performance helped launch a strong career, from appearing in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina alongside Ana de Armas to major roles in the Twilight franchise, a series that grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide. Regardless of how one feels about Twilight, it shows how significant her rise was after Maria Full of Grace.
The film also earned widespread recognition beyond Sandino Moreno. Several actors received nominations for their work, Joshua Marston, who directed the film, won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and the film itself won the Audience Award at Sundance.
While the awards clearly highlight how impressive Marston’s work on this film is, it’s also important to consider why he did such a fantastic job. The answer lies in the depth of research behind the story. The film is gripping from start to finish not only because of the phenomenal acting, but also because Marston grounded the screenplay in real stories and interviews.
His process has often been described as “old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting,” a description that feels especially fitting when you consider the film’s tagline: “Based on 1,000 true stories.” This is clearly meant to represent the thousands of people who have taken journeys like Maria’s, rather than literally a thousand interviews. Still, Marston spoke with a wide range of individuals whose experiences would be included in that 1,000-story figure, and their stories directly shaped the script. These included:
- A real drug courier who transported drugs internally, the initial spark for the film.
- Incarcerated drug swallowers in both the U.S. and South America.
- Female flower-plantation workers in Colombia.
- U.S. Customs inspectors.
- Colombian immigrants living in Queens.
- Orlando Tobón, known as the “Mayor of Little Colombia,” who helped arrange burials for deceased mules, and later played a version of himself in the film.
There’s something admirable about the care Marston took to portray these stories accurately. He wanted to show what people actually endure—the economic pressures, the limited choices, and the life-or-death risks people take when pushed into the drug trade. Despite this being Sandino Moreno’s first film, Marston said, “due to her theatre work as a hobby, you know, sort of on the sides on the weekends, I trusted that she knew the basics about acting… because she hadn’t been in TV soap operas or anything else, I was comfortable that she wasn’t going to have all these bad habits that an actor can get.” Clearly, Marston believed Sandino Moreno would be an excellent choice to portray the story accurately and thoughtfully, which speaks volumes about the care he put into this film.
Marston has said that he wanted to counter the usual Hollywood narrative of drug traffickers as one-note villains and instead make a more humanistic film, one focused on individual choices rather than politics. But when you consider the events of the movie, and the fact that so many of its themes still define reality more than twenty years later, it’s almost surprising to hear him say he wasn’t trying to make a political film. Everything that unfolds in Maria Full of Grace is rooted in political conditions.
Politics in the Background, Human Lives in the Foreground
The film tackles a wide range of political issues, and nearly every major event Maria experiences stems directly from political and economic conditions far beyond her control.
Maria is a 17-year-old girl working at a flower plantation in Colombia. Early on, we see the harsh conditions of the job: strict rules, limited bathroom breaks, and an environment that resembles a sweatshop more than a legitimate workplace. The only small joy Maria finds there is joking with her best friend and co-worker Blanca. That moment aside, everything else at the plantation reflects exploitation. When Maria gets sick and vomits on the flowers, her supervisor berates her and demands she clean the mess and work extra to make up for lost time. With her paycheck helping support her family, Maria eventually quits, even though this job is essentially the only legitimate employment available in her town.
The film makes clear that the lack of alternatives is what traps so many young women. Maria’s family pressures her to beg for her job back because there are no other options. At the same time, the reason for her nausea becomes clear: she’s pregnant. That knowledge, paired with family pressure and low wages, makes her vulnerable when Franklin, a man who appears interested in her romantically, turns out to be a recruiter for a drug organization. The promise of quick money and a better future for her baby becomes the rationalization for taking an enormous risk.
Throughout the film, the drug trade is portrayed as yet another form of exploitation. The drug lords profit, while the mules, often young, poor women, absorb all the danger. In the U.S., it’s easy for people to moralize and criticize someone like Maria for making this choice. But the film pushes the audience to confront how “bad decisions” are often shaped not by individual morality but by the economic systems surrounding people with no alternatives.
We see this exploitation clearly through Lucy, an experienced mule whose body breaks down under the strain. The scenes of these women swallowing dozens of drug-filled pellets and navigating customs underline how degrading this process is. When one of the pellets Lucy’s swallowed ruptures mid-flight, she dies shortly after arriving in New York. The traffickers who pick up the trio of women show no care, treating Lucy not as a human being but as a lost shipment. It’s one of the most powerful illustrations in the film of how the drug trade reduces vulnerable people into disposable containers.
The film also highlights gender expectations in Colombia. Maria’s boyfriend is immature and unprepared for fatherhood, even unable to tell Maria he loves her, yet Maria is pressured to marry him because that’s “what she’s supposed to do.” Her refusal of marraige is a quiet act of rebellion, and it adds another layer to why the opportunity to be a mule, for all its risks, feels like the only door open to her.
Marston shifts the perspective away from the usual “cartels versus law enforcement” framing. Instead, the film focuses on why people take these risks in the first place. It implicitly critiques policies that punish mules, the lowest rung in the supply chain, while ignoring U.S. demand for drugs and the global economic inequalities that feed the trade.
Maria’s immigration journey is a microcosm within a larger story. Her arrival in Queens illustrates how Colombian immigrant communities formed and how they support one another. Orlando Tobón, who plays himself, acts as the moral center of this community, helping people find housing, jobs, and even arranging the repatriation of the bodies of mules who die. When Maria and Blanca stay with Lucy’s sister Carla, we see another side of the immigrant experience. Carla’s grief and rage after learning of Lucy’s death, and her feeling of betrayal from the Maria and Blanca for not informing her of Lucy’s death, reflect the trauma families endure when loved ones take these dangerous routes and or die as a result of drugs.
The film never allows these realities to feel distant or abstract. Instead, it grounds every political theme in human experience. This is why, even though Marston has said he didn’t set out to make a political film, Maria Full of Grace is inherently political. The conditions it depicts were accurate when the film was released nearly 22 years ago, and in many ways, they remain just as relevant today. If the film premiered now, it would still feel like an honest reflection of the struggles faced by migrants and the economic pressures that push people toward desperate choices.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
This film was released in 2004, less than ten months before the presidential election in which George W. Bush won re-election. Bush and current President Donald Trump share similarities in how they approached immigration, particularly in their emphasis on enforcement, border security, and framing migration as a national security issue. While their policies are not identical, the political climate surrounding immigration today echoes many of the same tensions that shaped the early 2000s.
Because of these parallels, the film’s themes remain strikingly relevant. The stories that inspired Maria Full of Grace are more than two decades old, yet many of the pressures faced by people like Maria still exist, and in pretty much all cases have intensified. Watching the film today, the combination of its documentary-like realism and the continuity of U.S. immigration policies makes it feel just as urgent in 2025 as it did in 2004.
Both administrations increased funding for border security and expanded immigration enforcement, creating high stakes for migrants navigating legal and physical risks. Trump’s approach has been more aggressive, with stricter deportations, family separation, and harsher rhetoric, but the underlying structures, economic precarity, limited opportunities, and systemic exploitation, remain largely unchanged. Policies that punish vulnerable people while leaving broader economic and social forces intact mirror the dilemmas depicted in the film, where poverty and lack of choices push women like Maria into dangerous work. Whether that be in the United States, or of course, Colombia
Even as political rhetoric changes, the core pressures highlighted in Maria Full of Grace, economic desperation, dangerous migration routes, criminalization of vulnerable populations, and exploitation of marginalized labor, persist. Media consolidation has also made it harder for immigrant-driven stories to gain visibility, increasing the value of films that humanize these experiences.
With media consolidation accelerating, coverage of immigration is often reduced to a one-dimensional focus on border “crises” or partisan conflict, while stories about immigrants as individuals, families, and workers tend to disappear. This narrow framing shapes public opinion and policy in ways that rarely reflect the reality of the people most affected.
You can see this dynamic clearly in how many major outlets framed the genocide in Gaza after October 7th, focusing heavily on official Israeli and U.S. government narratives while the voices of Palestinians are often minimized or absent. Add to that the recent takeover of CBS by Larry Ellison, and the editorial direction under Bari Weiss, both of which raise legitimate concerns about which stories will be prioritized and which perspectives could be sidelined. Meanwhile, Trump’s ongoing public attacks on journalists, or doing something like attacking CNN for reporting on an ICE-tracking app create an even more hostile climate for accurately reporting on immigration, or just covering these stories at all.
A study from nearly four and a half years ago now found that major TV networks consistently underrepresented immigrants in their own stories about the southern border, rarely quoting the people living through these policies. With the continued consolidation of media ownership and pressure from political figures, it’s hard to imagine mainstream coverage of immigrant-driven stories expanding rather than shrinking. Stories that highlight the trauma immigrants face are becoming easier to overlook unless you seek out independent or alternative media.
Mainstream news still shapes how many older Americans understand the world, and it’s very easy to point out how easily certain realities slip through the cracks. A fictional film from over 20 years ago now does a better job of showing the lived experience of people navigating poverty, violence, and migration than much of today’s national news or traditional news outlets do.
Commercial news will almost always sensationalize these experiences, portraying migrants as chaotic or criminal because that framing attracts viewers. While Maria Full of Grace is a fictional film, it was built from the stories of real people the director interviewed. And when modern coverage fails to center immigrant voices, it’s no surprise that people increasingly look back at a film this old, a work of fiction, yes, but one rooted in truth, for the nuance and humanity that are missing in mainstream reporting.
The fact that the real-life conditions that informed this film are still happening today gives it even greater emotional weight. In 2025, Maria Full of Grace doesn’t feel like a story about the past, it feels like a reflection of the world many immigrants still navigate. It has “aged like fine wine,” not because it predicted anything, but because the systemic forces it portrays have changed so little over time.
Grace Under Pressure, Then and Now
This is a movie that I clearly watched at a much younger age than I probably should have. I wouldn’t say it “radicalized” me or shaped my worldview on its own, but it became more relevant to me as I grew older and understood more about the realities behind the story. At first, it was simply a gripping film that told a powerful story about someone overcoming the odds of their environment. As I learned more about the world, the film only gained more meaning.
Even though the experiences that inspired Maria Full of Grace are more than twenty years old, stories like the ones told in this film deserve visibility today. These are human stories, and Marston handles them with care. His research, interviewing drug swallowers, visiting flower plantations, and spending time in Colombian communities in New York, allows him to tell a story that is grounded, empathetic, and free of caricature. His ability to move beyond stereotypes and focus on human beings caught inside larger systems is one of the reasons this film remains so powerful.
The film’s humanist perspective on the “war on drugs” and the life-altering consequences it has on ordinary people is especially important. The United States’ decades-long counternarcotics efforts in Colombia, a mix of interdiction, military aid, crop eradication, and development programs, continue to shape the realities people like Maria face. Whether or not one believes the U.S. should act as a global enforcer, it’s fair to question why billions of dollars are spent on militarized strategies rather than directly supporting communities disproportionately harmed by the drug trade. Recent tension in U.S.–Colombia relations, including the U.S. declaring Colombia “failing demonstrably” to meet drug-control obligations, makes it clear that the pressures depicted in this film remain ongoing. Stories like Maria’s are not relics, they are reflections of conditions that persist.
I didn’t become a fan of this film because of its politics. I became a fan because it tells an incredible, very real story about what many young women in Colombia go through, and because its emotional impact deepened as I grew older. The fact that a film I first watched as a kid could grow alongside me and reveal more layers over time says a lot about its quality. Beyond being a near, if not, 5-out-of-5 film, it feels like an essential watch in 2025 because of how truthful and relevant it remains. Its humanization of people navigating poverty, migration, and risk is more empathetic and more carefully constructed than what most people will ever see in documentaries or news coverage.
If anything, the continued emergence of films like the 2024 Cannes award winning Souleymane’s Story, which explores the day-to-day struggles of a young immigrant from Guinea navigating France’s immigration and legal systems, shows that the themes Maria Full of Grace engages with are not confined to Colombia or the United States. These issues exist globally. And that universality makes Maria’s story feel even more necessary over two decades later.
Ideally, people would watch this film and come away with a more informed or more open perspective about the realities it depicts. Even if that isn’t always the outcome, I still think it’s a necessary film for anyone, regardless of where they stand politically. The craft, the performances, and the honesty of the storytelling speak for themselves. And while I have my issues with the ordering of certain “greatest films” lists, the fact that this movie sits in the top 300 films of all time on Rotten Tomatoes is well-earned. Its awards, its critical acclaim, and the care that went into making it all justify why it still resonates more than two decades later.
One of the reasons I love film more than a television/streaming series is that a movie has to deliver its message within a finite amount of time. It has to decide what matters and express it clearly. This film does exactly that. In under 100 minutes, it tackles everything it needs to with focus, humanity, and emotional weight, and it keeps the audience engaged the entire time. Marston spoke in a 2004 interview with Bobby Wygant about a young Colombian man who saw the film three times and said it changed his mind about becoming a drug mule. The young man even told Marston that the film saved his life, which demonstrates how powerful and beautifully made it is. Its impact isn’t limited to Americans or foreigners, it also resonates with Colombian citizens facing little hope and wrestling with the possibility of becoming drug mules themselves
If you love filmmaking, storytelling, or art in general, you’ll appreciate this movie on that level alone. But if you understand even a little of the political nuance behind the story, you’ll get even more out of it. And even if you don’t, the film is strong enough to educate, illuminate, and open the eyes of anyone watching. That’s why Maria Full of Grace remains one of the most important films of the 21st century, and why it’s still worth watching in 2025.
SLOT 