Maria Full of Grace

In a small village in Colombia, the pregnant seventeen years old Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) supports her family with her salary working in a floriculture. She is fired and with a total lack of perspective of finding a new job, she decides to accept the offer to work as a drug mule, flying to USA with sixty-two pellets of cocaine in her stomach. Once in New York, things do not happen as planned. Written by Stephen BowenPlot



María Álvarez, a 17-year-old Colombian girl (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno), works in sweat shop-like conditions at a flower plantation to help support her family. However, 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 a new job, she is 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 heroin 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. To retrieve the pellets from Lucy, a fellow mule who died when one of them ruptured inside of her, the traffickers cut open her stomach, then disposed of her body. After seeing this ruthless world firsthand, Maria decides to escape the drug-trafficking cartel.