Filmed primarily in Colombia, María, full of grace, is a dramatic film about the illegal drug industry that occurs between Colombia and the United States. The film was released in 2004 and has an approximate duration of 90 minutes. María, llena eres de gracia, effectively portrays the differences in lifestyle between the United States and South American countries with a much smaller GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Viewers will see the lengths people go to to get drugs through customs and earn extremely large amounts of money.
At the beginning of the film, we get an idea of what Maria’s daily life is like in Colombia. She works in a flower shop removing thorns from roses. Her boss goes around the islands of her workers all day asking for more production and asking if her workers are meeting her quotas. Maria returns home every day to a small house with about three rooms that she shares with her mother, two sisters, and a young niece. She also has a boyfriend named Juan who doesn’t have a very promising future and has a carefree attitude. Juan and María often walk through the town and stop to kiss or climb on the rooftops to have some privacy.
The director portrays an active nightlife in the Colombian city where María lives. She and Juan often go out drinking and dancing at various parties or clubs with Maria’s little sister, Blanca. Juan tends to drink too much and doesn’t pay much attention to María, leaving her looking for boys for her friends and for María to be flirted with by other young people at parties. She seems like a young woman who has morals and is wiser than most of her friends, which leads the viewer to think that she and Juan will not make it together. This is especially evident when a hip young guy named Franklin approaches her and attracts her attention unlike most of the other guys. Franklin and Maria end up sharing paths, but they will meet again.
Maria and Juan are obviously very attracted to each other, and while Maria is talking to Juan privately one afternoon, she tells him that she is pregnant with his child. Juan reacts to this news in a very immature way, first getting angry and then asking Maria to marry him. He feels that it is her responsibility and that it is the right thing to do at this time. She doesn’t say yes because she feels he’s not being genuine and he doesn’t really want to get married. She leaves and returns to her work, where a bad situation becomes much worse. Her boss is constantly looking over her shoulder again, causing her to become irritated and quit her job. She returns home to argue with her mother and her sisters, who accuse her of being selfish as the family is in dire need of money.
A frustrated Maria leaves the house to think about a new job and rides past Franklin on her motorcycle. She gets on the motorcycle with him and they go to the city together to have a drink and talk to one of her friends. It’s clear at this point that Franklin is trying to drive Maria crazy and that she is really enjoying his relaxing company. The two end up going to a seedy bar where a gangster-looking man is sitting in the corner. Franklin approaches him and gets the man to agree to talk to Maria for a moment. The dirty looking man is heavily involved in cocaine trafficking and offers Maria a job. She lies about her age, she says that she is eighteen when in reality she is only seventeen, and says that she will gladly work for him. The man gives her several hundred dollars to prove her word is good, and she tells Maria to meet him at a local doctor’s office in a few days. Maria is more relaxed at this point and returns home to donate part of the money to her family in need.
María Llena eres de Gracia really becomes interesting when María arrives at the doctor’s office a few days later. She is led upstairs through a secret passageway where the doctor and the drug lord are waiting for her. The doctor asks her to swallow a lubricating liquid and a pill that will slow down her digestion process. The drug lord, whose name is Javier, asks him to swallow a total of sixty-two synthetic rubber-coated pellets filled with cocaine. She struggles as she swallows all of her pellets, but manages to get them all into her stomach and onto a plane to New York. Once in New York, she will fully digest the pellets and wash them before handing them over to drug dealers.
On the plane to New York, he sees two other drug mules he knows, a woman named Lucy and her little sister, Blanca. Blanca is only sixteen years old, but she knows that if she can make it through this trip, she has a chance to win more than five thousand dollars. In a country like Colombia where people don’t have the opportunity to earn a lot of money, five thousand dollars can change one’s life. While María and Blanca have severe stomach pains during the flight, Lucy becomes seriously ill. The plane lands in New York, where the girls know they need to digest the pellets quickly, especially for Lucy, who is in danger of dying because one of the pellets breaks open in her stomach.
However, Maria looks suspicious as she goes through customs at the New York airport. The police and customs agents take her to an examination room to begin interrogating her in Spanish. She denies having any kind of drug in her body, but she can’t produce a credible story for the agents. Maria is forced to give a urine sample to rule out drugs in her system where the agents discover that she is pregnant. The agents really want to do a CT scan on her stomach to look for capsules or pellets that contain drugs, but they quickly dismiss it due to her pregnancy. Fortunately, Maria leaves the customs office and meets Lucy and Blanca.
The three young women meet again in a hotel room where drug dealers stay. The men watch the three young women and wait patiently for them to digest the drug pellets and clean them up. María and Blanca get the pellets out quickly, but Lucy is still in grave danger. It turns out that a pellet opened in her stomach where she received a lethal dose of cocaine. While she is in the bathroom, she passes out and dies under the spray of water from the shower. The youths send Lucy and Blanca out of the room briefly, and when they return to the room they are terrified. Lucy is gone, but there is blood all over the tub and a dead feeling in the room.
At that moment, María and Blanca grab their cocaine pills and run out of the hotel. They find Lucy’s sister in a random apartment building and manage to stay there for several weeks. Lucy’s sister puts the two girls in touch with a local man who has a way of finding work for young Latina women with little prospect of finding a job. She learns that the two women are drug mules and have large amounts of cocaine in their bags, also informing them that Lucy was in fact disemboweled and murdered at the hotel so the young men could retrieve their drugs.
María and Blanca are terrified and know that if they don’t do the right thing, they will be killed too. Therefore, they contact the drug dealers and deliver the cocaine pellets to them. After accounting for all the pellets, the young men make fair and pay the two girls the full amount of money each is owed. Maria feels guilty for taking advantage of Lucy’s sister and grateful that she is allowed to stay in the woman’s apartment, so she gives most of her money to Lucy’s sister. This money is intended to pay off her debt to the woman and, more importantly, to pay for Lucy’s funeral.
Now that María and Blanca have money to return to Colombia and have safely resolved the situation with their cocaine pills, they must return to the airport and leave New York. This time they safely clear customs and are ready to board the plane when the two young women have an argument. Blanca is still immature and she doesn’t realize that she can do better in life than being a drug mule. Maria has come to after talking to Lucy’s sister and she realizes that life as a drug mule or life in Colombia really isn’t a life at all. She now knows that there are more opportunities for her in the United States and especially in New York. As Blanca boards the plane and waits for Maria to board, Maria turns around without saying a word, vowing never to leave the United States. This is a very dramatic point in the movie where Maria shows that she has learned life lessons from her and now wants to have a better life for herself and her baby on the way.
María llena eres de gracia offers a chilling account of what life is like in Colombia, especially for a drug mule. It is also clear from watching this movie that there is an extremely large amount of money involved in the illegal drug industry. Research shows that large numbers of drug mules are caught at US customs and borders, yet drug lords still manage to rake in billions of dollars each year. The profit margin on their product is so great that they can afford to lose almost half of their product when drug mules are caught every day in the United States. María Llena eres de Gracia is not only the story of a poor family that seeks better opportunities as drug mules; it is an accurate account of the lengths to which people will go to earn money in poor areas. While many people make large amounts of money producing and trafficking drugs in countries like Colombia, it is still illegal and extremely punishable in the United States. The risks are great and include life imprisonment or death. Due to the simple plot and drama involved in the film, Maria Full of Grace is rated 3.5 out of 5.