from Variety / by Kathy A. McDonald

A subtitled Spanish-language film starring an unknown Colombian actress directed by a little-known helmer-scribe with a July release would be a definite long shot for awards consideration in most years.

Joshua Marston’s “Maria Full of Grace” provides a case study on how a small pic went from a Sundance Film Festival premiere all the way to an actress Oscar nom for Catalina Sandino Moreno.

“The film came out in July and was very well received and reviewed,” says Marian Koltai-Levine, former exec VP of marketing at Fine Line, which distributed the film, and now exec VP of marketing at Picturehouse Films. “What ended up happening was the film continuously held up against scrutiny. And as much as we think we can manipulate the system, there was a grassroots, organic groundswell of support.”

Propelled by Moreno’s performance, the film’s 48 nods (SAG and Spirit among them) and 27 kudos included a tie for Silver Bear for actress at Berlin. Sharing the award with Moreno: “Monster’s” Charlize Theron. “Really early on, that award gave us a leg up and moved Moreno from unknown status,” contends Picturehouse’s Dennis O’Connor, who also worked on the film’s campaign while an exec at Fine Line.

“Our strategy was to keep the film out there as much as possible, to keep visibility up,” O’Connor adds.

Part of the effort was to make it understood that Moreno was indeed acting.

“Catalina comes from an upper-class Colombian family. The character is really not her. We tried to distinguish her own background. While there are similarities, she’s not a drug runner who grew up poor,” O’-Connor notes.

Although the film did not earn a Golden Globe nod, critical support was across the board and ranged from most top 10 lists, a Broadcast Film Critics’ nod to Seattle, Los Angeles and New York critics’ associations prizes.

Both marketing execs credit director Marston and his lead actress with working tirelessly to promote the film, taking advantage of every opportunity, whether a festival screening with Q&A, panel or other film-related events.

“They would talk to 15 to 1,500 people, and that kind of sincerity and passion is contagious,” Koltai-Levine says.

Also crucial to the film’s award-season chances: a timely homevideo release and wide distribution of screeners, putting the film in the position to be discovered.

Adds Koltai-Levine, “I feel really strongly that all you can ask someone to do is to make an educated vote. Our goal was to make it the top of the must-see DVD list.”

from The Birmingham Post / by Mike Davies

Mike Davies says Grace with Catalina Sandino Moreno

Although the reality was that she was never going to win the Best Actress Oscar for her title role in Maria Full of Grace, Catalina Sandino Moreno can be deservedly proud to have been an unexpected wild card nominee at this year’s Academy Awards.

Not only does she enter the rarefied lists of those who have been nominated for their first feature film appearance but the 24 year old actress also made history by becoming the first Colombian to ever receive an Academy nomination.

Born in Bogot, in 1981, Catalina became interested in acting at an early age. In 1997, while still in high school, she enrolled in the city’s Ruben Di Pietro theatre academy before going on to study advertising at Bogot University, keeping up acting classes as a sideline and appearing in various amateur productions, including The Dark Room by Tennessee Williams.

Two years ago, already juggling twin fledgling careers in advertising and her mother urged her to audition for her first professional acting role, that of a pregnant drugs mule who, at great risk to her own life, smuggles a cache of cocaine-packed pellets into the United States in her stomach.

A middle class young woman from a well to do family, her father a cattle breeder, mom a pathologist, Moreno’s own experiences are a world away from that of Maria so, having won the role, the first thing she wanted to do was to find out where her character was coming from.

“I wanted to understand her family background, why she’s so tired,” she explains.

“I resisted talking to mules because Maria does not have anything to do with drugs herself - and me neither - and I wanted to be pure to that character. My job was to be truthful. So I went to live and work in a flower plantation in a little Colombian town for two weeks. Nobody knew why I was there.”

Starting work at seven in the morning, Moreno quickly got an insight into Maria’s frustrations.

“I didn’t dethorn the roses as they do in the movie, I just cut them, but it was still awful. Those jobs are pretty hard, working with the roses for hours and hours. And you don’t stop, you just keep on doing it. So I could understand why she was so tired and bored and depressed.”

Moreno was actually fired beforeher fortnight was up, the plantation owners apparently not taking kindly to her constant questioning of her fellow workers about their poor conditions and pathetic wages. But if working with flowers was a case of waking up and smelling the Colombian coffee, the whole process of drug smuggling was even more of a revelation.

While most Colombians are aware of drug mules, Moreno says that, like her, very few have any idea of what it actually entails or about the mules themselves.

“I grew up knowing about mules, but I didn’t even care,” she admits.

“I hated politics. I didn’t want to talk about it. Nobody likes to talk about it. And of course we have a lot of other problems, If we see someone on TV being caught smuggling in America, the first thought is that they are awful people, ruining their lives and putting another problem into the world, making more addicts.

“Or we will say it’s the parents’ fault, that they did not do their job well because the girl is in jail. But that’s a very cruel statement. We don’t stop to think that maybe the girl was smuggling drugs to America to make money for her parents to buy a house. When we screened the film in Bogot we realised no-one knew about the actual process of muleing, or even thought of these mules as real people. It was an eye-opener. And for me too.

“When I started the film. I lived in this bubble because my family and friends are fine and I don’t need anything. But when I started my research and discovered the extent to which this was happening in my country - and that it could happen next door and that there stories about out of work Colombian actors who were caught going to the US as mules - I was really shocked.”

Ironically, Moreno was to also experience first hand the same terrifying ordeal so many Marias go through trying to enter America.

“It was horrible. I had been back to Colombia to change my visa, and was returning to New York to finish the movie. I was relaxed and I took my bags and immediately someone came over and opened my bag. There were three people there and it was so intimidating that I got really nervous.

“I knew what the process was: that if they see you are nervous they will ask for an x-ray or something. So I was telling myself to just be calm, but my heart was pumping and my palms were sweating. And it was so horrible.

“And then they asked for my wallet. And I’m thinking, ‘Why don’t you just look at my visa? I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a mule, I’m just a student coming to New York to work with these people’. But they didn’t buy what I was telling them about the movie. They thought it was just a story. I was there for three hours.”

In the wake of the Oscars, a rather more recognisable Moreno should find entering America a little easier. Indeed, having had a childhood dream of going to New York to act on Broadway, she used the money from Maria to move to Manhattan, taking an apartment on 42nd Street and paying for a year’s acting classes at the Lee Strasburg Institute.

As yet Hollywood’s not come knocking at her door and, when she’s not touring the film festival circuit picking up awards, her work since wrapping Maria has included anunglamorous stint as a theatre usher and, when the original actress fell ill, the role of Blanche in an offoff Broadway production of Shakespeare’s King John that few people went to see.

A combination of her stunning, natural and deeply felt performance and its deserved Academy nomination should soon ensure she’ll not be having to show disgruntled patrons to their seats for the foreseeable future. But even if it all stopped tomorrow, Moreno has already made her mark in the movie historybooks. The moment is indelibly etched in her memory.

“I was at home on the Upper East Side watching the nominations being announced on television and giving my mum in Colombia a running commentary by phone. I just couldn’t believe it when they said my name and I saw my face on TV. I went silent. But my mum could just tell and started screaming. I’m the first Colombian to be nominated and my family is so proud.

Maria Full of Grace opens Friday

from The Sunday Herald

CATALINA SANDINO MORENO Who was Oscar-nominated for her role as a drug mule in Maria Full Of Grace

How familiar are you and your fellow Colombians with the drug mules?

Everybody knows about mules in Colombia, but nobody likes to talk about it. When we screened the film in Bogota we realised that no- one knew about the actual process of muleing.

Were you surprised?

Oh yeah. I discovered the extent to which this was happening in my country, that it could happen right next door. There were stories about Colombian actors who were out of work and were caught going to the US as mules - that really shocked me.

How hard was the scene in which you have to swallow the heroin pellets?

It was a sugar pellet, the same size and thickness as the real thing. I hadn’t even practised when we did the scene, so when you see my discomfort that is very, very real. I swallowed two.

Have you ever been stopped by US immigration?

Yes, ironically when I was flying to New York to finish the movie. I knew what the process was, but still my heart was pumping, my palms were sweating.

Where were you when you heard you’d been nominated for an Oscar?

At home on the Upper East Side. I was watching TV and giving my mum in Colombia a running commentary. I couldn’t believe it when I saw my face on TV. I went silent. But my mum could just tell, and starting screaming.

Did you mind not winning?

No. I was the first Colombian to be nominated. My family is so proud.

So now you’re living in New York?

I funded myself with the money from Maria to move to New York and pay for acting classes, at the Lee Strasburg Institute. All my life I had dreamed of going to New York and being an actress.

Maria Full Of Grace is released March 25.

from The Guardian / by Zoe Williams

Two years ago Catalina Sandino Moreno was a student in Bogotá. Tomorrow she is in the running for an Oscar for her extraordinary performance in Maria Full of Grace. The film, telling the story of a Colombian drug-mule, was a revelation even to her, she tells Zoe Williams

Maria Full Of Grace is an astonishing film debut for so many of its participants. Catalina Sandino Moreno was at university in Bogotá, studying advertising and taking acting lessons on the side, when she auditioned for the starring role of a pregnant drugs mule - her first professional part. Tomorrow, she is up for an Academy Award for best actress, nominated alongside Kate Winslet, Hilary Swank, Annette Bening and Imelda Staunton.

More about Maria Full Of Grace

Passage to 42nd Street

Two years ago Catalina Sandino Moreno was a student in Bogotá. Tomorrow she is in the running for an Oscar for her extraordinary performance in Maria Full of Grace. The film, telling the story of a Colombian drug-mule, was a revelation even to her, she tells Zoe Williams

Saturday February 26, 2005
The Guardian

Catalina Sandino Moreno
Unaffected: Catalina Sandino Moreno. Photo: Getty

Maria Full Of Grace is an astonishing film debut for so many of its participants. Catalina Sandino Moreno was at university in Bogotá, studying advertising and taking acting lessons on the side, when she auditioned for the starring role of a pregnant drugs mule - her first professional part. Tomorrow, she is up for an Academy Award for best actress, nominated alongside Kate Winslet, Hilary Swank, Annette Bening and Imelda Staunton.

Article continues
Ostensibly, Maria Full Of Grace is an exploration of what might make a person - a pregnant person, at that - swallow a vast quantity of drugs and smuggle it into the US, from Colombia, at great risk to her life and liberty. Moreno’s character works on the production line in a flower factory, a great warehouse of clipped roses and desperate women. She’s staring down the barrel of a lifetime’s boredom and poverty, even before she gets fired. After that, some nefarious biker takes her to Bogotá, where begins her entanglement with some thuggish traffickers. All this is very delicately drawn - the bad guys have no more than a shrugging, middle-management kind of menace. The film isn’t campaigning in the obvious sense, but there is a slow burn of pathos as the logic becomes obvious - rich westerners need drugs (and, apparently, flowers), greedy people will sort them out, and whatever retribution there is will be faced by the poorest, least culpable, most vulnerable players.

The American director, Joshua Marston, a photographer and political science graduate, had been interested in the drug war for some time, the more so when he met someone who had been a drugs mule. Making a film combined his interests - and the upshot, Maria Full Of Grace, won him the Best First Film award from the New York Film Critics Circle last month. It is not a flawless film - maybe the monotony is rendered a bit too faithfully in the first half before a biting tension takes hold. But at its best, it is brilliant - which is a triumph mostly of casting and, more specifically, of casting Catalina Moreno. She is an almost constant screen presence, and registers events and emotions with a subtlety that only a natural actor would trust to work. As full of grace as she is, she’s also unaffected in her delivery and body language; it’s a performance without vanity. Seeing her in the flesh, I’m amazed at how symmetrically pretty she is. (It’s not that she doesn’t look beautiful in the film; rather, the director never lingers on it and she never works to make you aware of it.)

What you think you know about drug-muling is a smattering - part real, part urban myth. The basics are pretty much established, though: people, so long as they’re poor enough, will internally ferry sufficient drugs across borders to kill themselves 60 times over. If they don’t get poisoned by an exploding condom of cocaine, they still face the myriad dangers represented by customs officials, drug barons and the psycho middlemen charged with delivering the product from the mules to the marketplace. It’s one of those occupations in which there are no allies, only enemies-in-waiting; the person becomes receptacle, and has no human worth on either side of the law. And it falls, naturally, to the most desperate inhabitants of the world’s largest drug exporters, of which Colombia is one. (In fact, it is the foremost exporter of cocaine; another big business is flowers, whose production is so laughably at odds with the romantic purpose of the bloody things that you’ll never want to see a bunch of roses again, unless you’ve picked them yourself. The flower business is revealed as pitifully paid, blindingly tedious, physically toxic and never unionised.)

It’s not until you see a properly researched and thoughtful portrait of drug-muling that you begin to comprehend the trauma involved - the nauseating size and quantity of the bundles, the terror of a person who might just as well have swallowed some uranium in a sandwich bag, crossing their fingers against their own stomach juices. Moreno agrees: “It’s so normal for us to hear about mules. I grew up knowing about mules, and I didn’t even care. I hated politics, I didn’t want to talk about it. I realised afterwards that even though there were a lot of problems in Colombia, this was one of the biggest problems we had.”

Moreno’s attitude has been mirrored by the Colombian response to the film, where it was released last year. Marston noted, “The interesting thing is that obviously you assume Colombians know a little bit more about drug smuggling … and yet time and time again I’ve been waylaid by Colombians afterwards saying, ‘Oh my God, that was interesting,’ because it’s something that was very eye-opening for them … they never get the actual details of what it’s like to travel as a drug mule.” The impact there has been extraordinary. The First Lady of Colombia has had two private screenings at the presidential palace, and the UN office in Bogotá has put in a request for a print, for “educational purposes”.

Even so, Moreno is sharply critical of Colombia’s official approach to the issue. “A couple of years ago, the government put posters all over the place saying ‘Don’t be a mule’. That’s their idea of a fight against drugs. They’d put these posters on garbage cans in the airport, as if this was an opportunity to get rid of all the pellets, and everything would be cool. They just don’t realise the implications for that person if they were to do that. If one pellet is missing, you will be killed. Your family will be killed. Telling people to put their drugs in the bin is not any help.”

Moreno herself comes from a middle-class family in Bogotá; her mother is a pathologist, her father breeds cattle. “I never saw poverty itself,” she says. “I grew up knowing how Bogotá was, where the poor people were situated. My parents made us realise, my brother and I, how fortunate we were.” Landing the part in Maria Full Of Grace was a fluke. A friend from her acting class called to tell her about the auditions, and her mother answered, which was lucky, since left to her own devices Moreno would not have gone along. “I didn’t want to go because in that moment I was having two careers, advertising and radio, so I was trying to focus my career. But my mother just pushed me to go, kept saying how weird it was for an American [Marston] to be interested in Colombia.” (In fact, Marston had a very hard time getting the film funded because of his determination to make it in Spanish. One potential backer suggested that, while keeping all the poverty and desperation in place, they give Maria’s family an English governess, so providing a reason for everyone in the film to speak English. The project was in the end rescued by the famously far-sighted HBO.)

Colombian life is dominated by conflict between right- and leftwing guerrilla groups (of which Farc, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, is the largest). Seven years ago, an area the size of Switzerland was declared a safe haven for Farc; its opponents have been claiming ever since that it has been turned into a terrorist training area. Kidnappings and disappearances are a common occurrence. In recent years, three million people have been forced from rural areas into urban slums, as each paramilitary side tries to wrest control of agricultural land. In 2004, the UN estimated Colombia had the third largest displaced population in the world.

At least, that’s the story in broad brush strokes. The way Moreno tells it, American foreign policy has brought about some devastating complications. “America has helped Colombia in a couple of ways. They have sent planes to fumigate the cocaine plantations. But that’s a big problem, because they fumigate not just the coke plantation, but everything. They fumigate the animals, so they die. They fumigate the crops, so they die. They poison the soil. The farmers can’t do anything, so they have to go and look for work, and the only work available is in joining the paramilitaries. These two groups have been fighting each other for 50 years. We’ve been in civil war for 50 years. For as long as my parents can remember.”

G rowing up in Bogotá has left Moreno with a watchfulness and an anxiety that she doesn’t notice unless it’s pointed out to her. “It’s no big deal, you just have some rules. When you’re going on a trip, you leave your credit card at home. You leave anything that someone could take from you at home. Sure, you can get kidnapped, they can check your bank account if they know your name, and if you have money, you’ll be kept. But you know what to do, and where you can go, and who you can talk to. In New York, I have 11 eyes. I’m aware. I’m ready. I’m never going to sit in a restaurant with the door behind me. I’m like a gangster. My boyfriend keeps telling me, ‘Chill, you’re in New York.’ But you don’t stop doing these things.”

Before filming Maria Full Of Grace, Moreno worked at a flower factory, de-thorning and packing roses. (She was able to only because a friend of her mother’s owned one.) “That job is pretty hard,” Moreno says. “They use these fumigants to get the bugs off the leaves, and they make your eyes itchy and red. You have to stand for eight or nine hours, you can’t talk to anybody, the flowers keep coming and coming, it’s very hard work, it’s very monotonous. When Valentine’s Day comes, it’s like hell. We don’t have unions, we’ve never had unions.” She managed to get fired before her fortnight was up, by asking too many questions of her fellow employees - did they have insurance, what were the conditions really like?

Men are mainly absent from Maria Full Of Grace, bar the aforementioned drug barons and psychos, but Moreno resists seeing this as a feminist issue; women make good mules, she says, because they are less frequently stopped at customs, but there are plenty of men involved as well - and arguably in a slightly worse position since, with their greater bodyweight, they have to swallow more drugs. She also points out that they have a higher risk of conviction, since they’re more likely to be stopped.

“The director told the story about women because that was the story he wanted to tell. But there are men and old people and children as well. There was a horrific case, of a mother who was carrying drugs, travelling with her baby. They realised the baby wasn’t moving, and they found the baby was dead. When they did the autopsy, the baby was also full of drugs. Everybody desperate is involved in this. You can’t say it’s men or women, it’s anybody desperate.”

Moreno is ambivalent about her own escape from Bogotá. Like a lot of affluent, young-women-in-a-hurry, she had been saving up to move to America since she was at school, knowing that New York would be a launch pad for her in a way Bogotá could not. After filming Maria Full Of Grace, the last part of which is set in Jackson Heights, a Colombian enclave in Queens, she moved to Manhattan and her response to the place has been mixed. “It was a big shock to me, America. In Colombia, everyone is like a family. In New York, everybody’s like, ‘I’m an American, I’m going to fight for me, I’m going to get this, and get that.’ In Colombia, it’s more, ‘We’re going to get this and that.’ ” For a year she trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and since then has toured the festival circuit - Berlin, Deauville, Sundance - being feted in a way that clearly tickles her. “A girl came up to me who was still crying. All she could say was, ‘Oh my God, I love you so much.’ ”

Even so, the offers of work have yet to come flooding in; Maria Full Of Grace is a foreign language, indie film, after all, and it didn’t make a straight-off splash when it was released in the US. Since moving to New York, Moreno has worked as a theatre usher; she got a job in an “off-off-off-off-off-Broadway” production of Shakespeare’s King John when the incumbent Blanche, the Spanish princess, pulled out. “We had a couple of reviews. People didn’t like it so much. But it was an incredible experience.” She started up with a non-acting boyfriend who, when she took him back to Bogotá to meet her parents, went down much better than all her previous boyfriends.

Naturally, her life is very different from that of the average Colombian immigrant. She says that everyone else who’s moved from Colombia to New York heads for Jackson Heights, whereas she lives in the middle of 42nd Street. She speaks English; she experiences no racial tensions, no hostility of any kind beyond the standard New York irritation with people who don’t walk fast enough. She doesn’t labour it, but her point is that, for regular immigrants, life is no easier on hitting US soil. The poverty doesn’t go away, the reliance on community support is even stronger.

For her, there have been upsides to America. Politically, New York is much more active than her home town. “I realised this only when I went on a protest against the war in Iraq, and it felt so good. Colombia has had so many wars, so many pointless wars, and nobody ever says anything. There are no laws against public protest, we just don’t do it. And I didn’t even realise how odd it was until I went to America.” She is chary of writing off her countrymen as apathetic, however: there was one march, she recalls, where some demonstrators travelled almost half the length of the country to protest against hospital closures. But it isn’t a country of mass grassroots protest, possibly because the most damaging activities are underground and illegal; perhaps it feels futile to march against something as faceless as drug crime.

Moreno’s journey to America has been as different as is possible from that of her character, Maria. She is a young, middle-class woman who has portrayed the desperate conditions on her doorstep rather than endured them. By her own reckoning, the film has totally changed her relationship with Colombia, even while giving her a springboard to leave; it has made her far more alive to its flaws and iniquities, but at the same time to its beauty, its personality.

Will she win the Oscar? Certainly the film ticks the “social conscience” box, and the Academy seems to like those. Plus, Moreno satisfies the “newcomer/dark horse” criterion, which makes it more exciting, especially if you’re a betting person. But regardless of the award, there is, I think, a recognition that she has done something amazing with this role - delivered an awe-inspiringly human portrait of an exploitation so common, and so ignored, that it makes the news only when it involves some horrible death. And that’s not because Moreno experienced it, or did the method thing in a flower factory: she’s an actor, and a brilliant one.

Maria Full Of Grace opens on March 25.

from Evening Standard / by James Mottram

A doctor’s daughter from Bogota is the unlikeliest of this weekend’s Oscar runners

IF THE name is unfamiliar, it soon won’t be. Catalina Sandino Moreno, the first Colombian to be nominated for an Oscar, goes head- to-head with Kate Winslet and Imelda Staunton for the Best Actress prize on Sunday. Her debut role as a drugs mule in Maria Full of Grace, which opens in Britain next month, won her a share of acting honours at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival, tying with Charlize Theron’s serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster.

But while the prosthetic-sporting Theron was all about “look-at- me” transformation, 24-year-old Moreno delivers quite the opposite as Maria: a performance of great natural beauty. With olive skin, black marble eyes and dark hair that tumbles over her shoulders, she plays a teenager so desperate to escape her small-town life of poverty that she risks death by ingesting pellets of heroin.

The film, written and directed by first-timer Joshua Marston, follows Maria as she attempts to smuggle a stomach-load of smack into New York.

“In Colombia, it’s an everyday story,” says Moreno, who beat 800 girls to win the role. “There are big posters saying ‘Don’t be a mule.’ So it’s a constant thing. Women never talk about it. Young people don’t care.

They try to hide it but it is everywhere in Colombia.”

The daughter of a Bogota pathologist and a veterinarian, Moreno’s affluent upbringing sets her apart as one of the lucky ones. Having dreamed of acting professionally she made the odd commercial, and theatre was “a constant in my life”, but Moreno was studying for a degree in advertising when she heard that Marston was in town casting a film.

“I read the script. I thought it was a very kind movie, a very human movie.

I don’t know anything about drugs; I didn’t have a background in them. I’d never met anybody that had done this. So for me it was fresh. But I loved the whole human part of the movie. It’s not just about a drug-mule who wants to go to America. It’s about a girl who has some problems and she makes some bad decisions.”

After discussing the role with her mother, Moreno was unsure whether she could play the part. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to get in her skin.

She has to do a lot of things that I’d never imagine doing.” But filming in Ecuador - it was too dangerous to shoot in Colombia - allowed her to live the role. “Oh, I was Maria the whole time,” she enthuses. “Being away from home really helped me. I was not in my usual bed. I was not with my mother. I was alone there.”

She even took to swallowing the fake pellets. “I practised but it was so hard. The day of the shooting the nervousness you see is totally real. I couldn’t do it at first.”

Such moments of authenticity have earned Maria Full of Grace comparisons to films by Ken Loach, who tackled Britain’s drugs problem in Sweet Sixteen.

“I’m very impressed by realist cinema - particularly British realism,” says Marston, an American who spent months immersing himself in Colombian culture.

Like Loach, he scoured schools and factories to find non- professional actors. He gave the cast half the script for 24 hours before taking it back and urging them to improvise.

Loach, for his part, is impressed. “I think it’s a very pleasing film with a lot of sensitivity, tact and warmth,” he has said.

The film avoids Hollywood-style drugs brutality. “One of the things I discovered was that there is this other form of violence, this psychological manipulation,” says Marston, a 35-year-old with a mop of curly, brown hair.

“One example is the paternal quality of the drug dealer, which many people told me about.

He’s very well-dressed, very kind and he gives the mules a lot of money. I have no doubt there are others - but my biggest problem with Hollywood is that it tends to repeat itself in using stereotypes.”

I ask what he thought of Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic.

Pointing at my tape recorder, he says: “You’ll have to turn that off for me to answer that question.”

After the film wrapped, Moreno decided to stay in New York to continue her studies. She admits that, like Maria, it was her dream from high school to move to America.

Since 2002, she has been living with David Elwell, a crew member from the film.

Moreno has yet to settle on a followup. For the moment, she’s soaking up the attention and preparing to enjoy her night with the stars.

“The only thing I know is that I’m going to have fun,” she says. “I’m going to be with my family. I talked to my grandmother and she said, ‘I’m going to go to LA, to see you at the Oscars.’ That’s perfect. I want all of my family to come.”

from The Record / by John Thorn

Catalina Sandino Moreno still waits in lines. Kate Winslet apparently does not.

A Hollywood newcomer’s arrival presents a strange education, with unexpected teaching moments popping up along the way. For Moreno, the 23-year-old Colombian star of “Maria Full of Grace,” the recent luncheon for Academy Award nominees offered new insight into show business queue protocol.

Moreno, who is nominated for best actress in the 77th annual Oscars, patiently waited her turn at the luncheon to pose for photographers, swaying occasionally in her high heels.

In front of her stood the filmmakers behind best picture contender “Sideways” and Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz, up for best original song from “Shrek 2.” No one was going anywhere. And then Winslet, nominated as best actress for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” cut past everyone, as if she were in some invisible car-pool lane.

Moreno and her publicist exchanged glances, yet reserved judgment, resuming a conversation about “Finding Neverland” best actor nominee Johnny Depp. “We all love Kate Winslet,” Moreno diplomatically said later.

If different rules apply to actors of different ranks, the Oscars can also simultaneously level the playing field, if only for a few post-nomination weeks.

Yes, Winslet starred in a global blockbuster called “Titanic.” Yes, “Million Dollar Baby’s” Hilary Swank already has won a best actress trophy. Yes, “Being Julia’s” Annette Bening is married to Warren Beatty. But like “Vera Drake’s” equally unfamiliar nominee, Imelda Staunton, the neophyte Moreno is a best actress nominee, too, and there she stands on identical footing.

“These people are all very good actresses, but I am here for a reason,” Moreno says after the luncheon, having shed her sleek, green luncheon dress and pumps for a white sweater and jeans. “Sometimes I have this confusion in my head and I freak out: ‘I’m the new girl, they don’t care about me, I’m not at their level.’

“Of course, I can’t be at the level of someone like Cate Blanchett,” Moreno says, referring to the best supporting actress nominee from “The Aviator,” whose work Moreno admires. “But I am nominated. I think it’s fantastic that I have the fifth spot, that I can be a part of that group. So when I get confused, I just shut down my brain.”

It’s probably a good idea, given how fast Moreno’s world has been turning.

Two years back, she was a Bogota advertising student, her dreams of moving to New

York and becoming an actor growing increasingly distant. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, her family prohibited her from moving, regardless of the cost.

Still, she kept acting, but with diminished hopes, as she was starting to lose interest in theater. Encouraged by her mother, she nevertheless tried out for the title role in American writer-director Joshua Marston’s debut feature. With “Maria Full of Grace’s” filming just weeks away, Marston hadn’t yet found somebody who could credibly play a 17-year-old girl who becomes a drug mule.

It’s a complex role, as Maria Alvarez is neither an innocent nor a delinquent. She instead lives in that shadowy region between the two extremes, where someone trapped by circumstances, including poverty and pregnancy, makes a series of bad decisions, even while her heart remains in the right place. Maria wants to escape her Colombian life, but the only way she’s going to be able to get to the United States is by smuggling drugs.

Marston already had considered about 800 actresses to play the role, while others had encouraged him to cast a star like Penelope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez. But he needed authenticity, not a name. With time running out in his quest for the perfect Maria, Marston popped Moreno’s videotaped audition into his VCR.

“She was not parroting another kind of performance,” Marston says of what immediately struck him in Moreno’s audition. The actresses he had rejected tended to be self-conscious, imitating the histrionics of Spanish-language soap operas.

“You could feel them doing a scene the way they might have remotely remembered seeing someone doing it on a soap opera. But Catalina was very natural. It’s a characteristic that is really rare.”

The filmmaker even used Moreno’s wide-eyed wonder to shape Maria’s portrayal. When the film’s character finally arrives in New York and takes in Times Square, it is Moreno herself who is also captivated by seeing the metropolis for the first time.

“All that sense of newness was something that I was looking for,” Marston says.

While Moreno didn’t face the physical challenges encountered by Swank, who trained for months to play a boxer, she did have to swallow eight thumb-sized balloons, which is how her character smuggles heroin pellets into the United States. Moreno also performed some minor stunts, including climbing a wall - and injured her knee in the process.

Because it was funded by a U.S. company and made with a mostly American crew, “Maria Full of Grace” was not eligible to be submitted by Colombia for the foreign language film Oscar. But there is no such rule keeping a first-time movie performer out of contention for a best actress award, even if she speaks Spanish throughout the film. Her Oscar nomination, while certainly a mild surprise, was hardly a shocker.

“I know it’s great exposure for this ‘new girl,’ but I don’t know how it’s affecting me,” Moreno says of the nomination in near-perfect English, a result of having attended an English-taught school in Colombia. “I know it’s happening to me, but the only other thing I know is this will help me get more roles like Maria.”

After the nominations were announced on Jan. 25, Moreno says the quality of the scripts sent to her improved, although she has yet to decide which movie to do next.

“I need the money,” she says. “I haven’t worked in a long time.”

from AP Worldstream / by Jake Coyle

Like the character she played in “Maria Full of Grace,” Catalina Sandino Moreno left Colombia to live in New York City. But her address Tuesday was more like Cloud Nine.

When Moreno was announced as an Academy Award nominee for best actress, she was “in total disbelief.”

With just this one film under her belt, the 23-year-old actress now finds herself nominated alongside Annette Bening and Hilary Swank. Having performed only in Colombian theater before being cast as a “mule” in “Maria Full of Grace,” Moreno may be the freshest face of this year’s nominees.

A year ago, the U.S. HBO cable TV network-produced “Maria Full of Grace” won best dramatic film at Sundance. Since then, the story of Maria, who turns to drug smuggling for money (a memorable scene shows her swallowing plastic-wrapped pellets of heroin), has become an independent hit.

Moreno’s natural performance has been trumpeted by critics and at festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival where she spl it lead actress honors with last year’s Oscar winner, Charlize Theron.

Just hours after Moreno heard the Oscar news, The Associated Press caught up with her to find out what it feels like to, in two years, go from being a student in Bogota to the actress everyone’s talking about.

___

AP: What went through your head when you heard your name announced?

Moreno: It was a mixture of everything. I was talking to my mother, I had my boyfriend right beside me. I was watching my face and my name. It was so unreal _ a total disbelief that it’s happening. It’s just unreal. This is unreal! This can’t be happening!

AP: When you began the movie, did you ever imagine this could happen?

Moreno: Oh, no. When I heard that HBO was going to be producing it, I thought it was going to be on HBO, the channel. And I was so happy because my mother had cable and I was like, “Oh my God, Mom, we can see it on HBO! We can just lay here in bed and watch it.” I never thought it was going to be rele ased. I never thought it was going to be in festivals, I never thought I or the movie could win something. And everything happened. It was just a dream that I never dreamt.

AP: It seems you were very much “discovered” in Bogota. How did you come to be cast in the film?

Moreno: I was studying acting in a little theater in Colombia and somebody saw me. I was at the end of my semester studying advertising in college and I was so busy that I didn’t want to go to the audition. The person who had seen me in the theater liked me and called my mother. She said, “Of course! Sure she’s going to go.” But I didn’t want to go _ I was so busy! My mother was the one that pushed me. She said, “You should go, you should go meet the American doing a Colombian film.” So I figured I would go and see what this American wants. I’m a Colombian girl, why not? Two weeks later, they called me to tell me the director wanted to meet me. At the end of that day, Josh (Joshua Marston, the film’s writer-director) told me: “Wel come to the crew; you’re my Maria.”

AP: What would you be doing today if you hadn’t done this film?

Moreno: I don’t know. I should be in school … maybe working in some (advertising) agency. And being in an office.

AP: Why do you think this movie has gotten so much attention?

Moreno: I think it’s because it’s a real story with real human beings with very naturalistic acting. (The actors) are so fresh and so natural and so human and so beautiful. And I think people like that. People don’t care about subtitles. People don’t care about races. It’s the story about Maria and it’s a whole point of view that even we Colombians didn’t know anything about.

AP: Are you excited for Oscar night?

Moreno: I’m happy. A lot of people ask me “what are you going to wear?” I’m like, “I don’t know! I just knew (I was going) three, four hour ago! I don’t know anything!” I just know that I’m trying to realize that I’m getting an Oscar nomination! That is very, very odd. Just let me digest it and then we talk about dresses. And the only thing I know is that I’m going to have fun. I’m going to be with my family. I talked to my grandmother and she was like, “I’m going to go to LA to see you at the Oscars.” That’s perfect! I want all of my family to come!

AP: So what’s next? How can you top this?

Moreno: Right now I’m breathing. And talking. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m just going to wait until after the Oscars. The exposure is good. It’s really, really good. I think it’s going to help me a lot, ’cause I’m the new girl between all the veterans. I’m just thrilled and I thank God.