from New York Daily News / by Brantley Bardin

When Catalina Sandino Moreno, the Colombian, Oscar-nominated actress of “Maria, Full of Grace” fame, got a call from director Mike Newell about his new film, she found he was nearby, in Spain. Newell wanted her to audition for the supporting role of flirty Hildebrande in his version of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic love story, “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

The British director, known for such hits as “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” was in Spain casting “Cholera’s” mostly Latina cast. The film stars Javier Bardem (also currently starring in “No Country for Old Men”) as a man who waits 50 years for the love of his life.

Newell learned Moreno was in the country, shooting a movie there, and that he could see her only on an early Sunday morning. “You can’t do that,” Newell remembers telling her. “You’d have to get up at 6 a.m. on your one day off.”

Moreno thought otherwise. “You bet your a– I can,” the 26-year-old Bogotá native informed him.

That kind of feisty determination has helped this daughter of a cattle breeder become the first international film star from Colombia, not to mention the first Colombian woman ever nominated for an Academy Award, for 2005’s “Maria.” That was a film she all but fell into when, as an amateur with no movie credits, she sent in an audition tape and beat 800 other actresses for the title role of a reluctant drug mule desperate to escape a life of dead-end drudgery.

Her success fills Moreno, who played an immigrant slaughterhouse worker in “Fast Food Nation” and is now shooting Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara biopic opposite Benecio Del Toro, with awe.

“It’s surreal,” says the actress, who lives in New York with her movie electrician husband. “One day I found myself in ‘Maria,’ an indie movie I thought they’d just show on TV or something, and then, suddenly, I’m at the Oscars. And now here I am working with Steven and Benecio and Mike Newell and Javier Bardem. I’m just, like, riding the wave!”

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” now in theaters, finds Moreno as a comedic coquette who knows no bounds in turn-of-the-century Cartagena. As Hildebrande, the cousin of Bardem’s life-long obsession, Fermina (portrayed by Italy’s Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Moreno steals scenes by naughtily puffing on a cigarette or doing a mini-striptease in a horse-driven carriage for Fermina’s soon-to-be husband (Benjamin Bratt).

“She’s a wonderful, natural comedienne, which no one knows yet,” says Newell. “She’s like some sort of lovely, juicy fruit hanging on the bough just waiting to drop. I mean, I came across this kind of oil gusher of a whole new girl under there!”

Filming “Love” “was like a party every day,” says Moreno, who’ll appear on the New York stage this winter in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play, “The Messenger Star.” “But everybody kept saying, ‘You’re so funny,’ like they were so shocked.

“Just because I do all these serious movies doesn’t mean you can’t have a damn laugh!”

from The Washington Times / by Jenny Mayo

There’s a scene in the 2004 film “Maria Full of Grace” in which the titular character asks another young woman what America is like. The pregnant, teenaged Maria has just accepted an offer to become a drug mule after being forced into a financial corner, and she’s about to leave her Colombian homeland for her first working trip to the United States.

She’s scared, anxious, a little shaky and maybe just a tad excited about catching her first glimpse of the land of Uncle Sam and apple pie.

“Over there, it’s like too perfect,” the young woman replies. “Everything’s straight.”

From the moment Maria hits the ground in the U.S., things are far from perfect. But for Catalina Sandino Moreno, the Colombian-born twentysomething who plays her, it’s been a very different story.

After she wrapped filming of what would be her cinematic debut, the actress moved to New York City to further her craft and await “Maria’s” release. When that happened in 2004, the Spanish-language film (by American director Joshua Marston) sent shock waves through the festival circuit and beyond with its searing portrayals and delicate examination of what happens at the intersection of money and morals.

The film not only introduced the then-unknown Miss Moreno to American audiences, but made her the talk of Tinseltown. In 2005, she was named ShoWest’s international star of the year and was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress.

She didn’t take home the Oscar, but the actress has since won her way into films by such acclaimed directors as Richard Linklater (”Fast Food Nation”), Walter Salles (the “Loin de 16eme” segment of “Paris, Je T’aime”) and most recently, Mike Newell (”Love in the Time of Cholera”).

America, says Miss Moreno, is her “second home.”

“America has given me work, has given me shelter, has given me food, has given me friends. I can’t complain about anything that America has given me,” she says.

However, when quizzed a bit more, the petite actress does eventually lodge a complaint.

She didn’t work for two years following “Maria,” and it’s not because she wasn’t getting offers. What came her way were a lot of roles that either felt too fluffy compared to her profoundly moving previous work, or ones that pegged the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty as a stereotypical Latina: lusty and brainless.

“After seeing people react to the movie ‘Maria,’ I couldn’t do any of these,” Miss Moreno says. “I have a personal responsibility not just for the people, but for me, being Colombian and being a Latina.”

Does she recall any of the distasteful roles she was offered?

“I don’t remember specific scripts, but I do remember that they were appalling,” she says. “I wasn’t just offended, but really sad, thinking my career was over because I will never get another job.”

Unwilling to compromise her morals, she waited for the right script and distracted herself with the thrills of the Big Apple and rigors of acting classes.

Eventually, several of the right scripts came her way. Theatergoers saw her playing a Mexican immigrant working in a U.S. slaughterhouse in Mr. Linklater’s “Fast Food Nation” in fall of 2006 and a Spanish-speaking immigrant who balances being a mom and a nanny for a wealthy family in Paris in Mr. Salles and Daniela Thomas’ portion of “Paris Je T’aime,” which arrived stateside this spring. (She has appeared in other films as well, including Ethan Hawke’s “The Hottest State,” although nothing as widely released or visible as “Fast Food Nation” and “Paris Je T’aime.”)

Sensing a trend yet?

“I love the immigrant stories,” says Miss Moreno. “I am an immigrant and there are so many people that come to this country. They have different stories and they’re very interesting and so completely different.”

She takes a moment to enumerate the positive attributes of each of the characters she’s played that fall under this umbrella, then continues: “I love to put a face on these immigrants and a body and a voice — to show that they’re not just criminals. I hate that word. They’re just people trying to get by, and of course sometimes you have bad people and you have good people, but a lot of that group are good people that work really hard to send money back to their countries.”

Recently, though, the immigrant-storyteller took a break from her usual niche and returned to her homeland to shoot Mr. Newell’s adaptation of Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

The film concerns itself primarily with a woman named Fermina Daza (played by Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and the two men who love her: Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), whom she’s married to, and Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem), who waits more than 50 years for her to love him back.

Miss Moreno plays Hildebranda Sanchez, Fermina’s cousin. It’s a small role that gets a bit lost in the two-plus-hour film, but the actress says there was no question about whether to take it. This was a chance both to visit her friends and family back in Colombia and pay homage to one of the country’s biggest legends.

In Colombia, says Miss Moreno, Mr. Garcia Marquez is “a god,” and “you have to know who he is” if you live there.

What’s “strange” and disorienting for the actress is that these days, most of her countrymen also seem to know who she is and make a big to-do when she makes return trips.

“It’s weird because I don’t need the attention,” she says.

Those of us who’ve seen her formidable talent at work know it’s something she’d better get used to, though; she’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come.

from CinemaBlend.Com / by Katey Rich

Catalina Sandino Moreno is not exactly what you’d call a household name, but given that she made her acting debut only three years ago—and got an Oscar nomination for it—she’s impressive regardless. A native Colombian, Moreno was at home on the set of Love in the Time of Cholera playing Fermina’s cousin Hildebranda, a strong-willed woman whose fate becomes victim to the standards of marriage she must live up to.

As an interview subject, Moreno give the impression that she’s genuinely the smartest person in the room—she can answer a question with a single raised eyebrow (unfortunately that’s impossible to put into a transcript) and say with great confidence that, when she’s sixty, she’ll look nothing like her weather-beaten character.–especially since, thanks to acting, she’s given up her nasty habit of nail-biting.

What was it like being on the set with all these people from all different parts of the world playing Colombian when you’re the one major Colombian in the movie in a lead role?
I didn’t even think that they were not Colombian. Cartagena is such a beautiful place and so magical and dramatic and sexy that when you see Javier as Florentino in old age you just don’t even remember that he’s Javier or he’s from Spain. And when you see Giovanna looking very young and pretty […] I think the environment helped us a lot, just getting into character…

How much time did you spend in Colombia?
I was there for a month, believe it or not. […] it’s very hard [playing older than you are], I’ve never been sixty and never been a hundred pounds heavier so the body was a change…how you grab things when you’re from the country and when you’re from the city…is gonna change. I didn’t know that. I thought, I’m fat, I’m gonna look fat. But looking fat is not being fat. So, we had a guy that was helping us with body movement and a voice coach. We had a great group of people doing that so I spent a month there just preparing.

Had you read the book before?
I did. I did.

In English or Spanish?
In Spanish. Growing up in Colombia, you have to read Garcia Marquez. And this is one of the books that you have to read. I read it when I was in high school. Then I read it when I was in college. And then when I knew that I was gonna be in the movie, I read it again. But everything in Spanish.

What is it about the book that they call it one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century? What is it about it that is so universal…?
Well, it’s a timeless story. A timeless love story. Sometimes when you see a movie about love, romance, it’s just—the guy and girl meet…and they break up…and they’re done. This is such a looong story about love. These people like each other when they were fifteen, sixteen. And they meet up when they’re old. It’s so beautiful that finally when they’re together they’re old, because there aren’t many movies where you see old people falling in love again.

In the beginning of the film your character is having an affair–
She’s not having an affair. She wants to have an affair.

Okay, right. Letter writing and glances.
Yeah, that’s so typical of her. She’s just putting the strong face. Letters. It’s so, like, magical. She’s putting magic to her relationship which is nothing. She has nothing with this guy. She’s just pretending to have a more exciting affair—like Fermina with the love letters. [What’s] so interesting about that character is the dichotomy of trying to be someone she is not.

And at the end she’s kinda adapted to her fate. She’s got everything taken care of. How did you depict that growth? …A woman on her own.
Well, I don’t think that’s a woman on her own. I think it’s a woman very unhappy with her life. Yeah, very unhappy. Because she wanted to be with this guy and they never had anything. And suddenly the biological clock started ticking. I think the family start pushing. “You have to get married, You have to get engaged…settle down.” So that’s what she does. She has six kids…that she doesn’t love. She’s unhappy, it’s so sad. In those times you just had to do it. You had to get married and have kids. Be a mom.

How did getting an Oscar nomination change things for you?
I think it’s that a lot of people saw Maria Full of Grace, which was great thing for me because I was new…that was my first movie. But the Oscar is not gonna make you have better scripts. Because I spent three years after the Oscar nomination without work…because all the scripts, I was not right for them. And then I got Fast Food Nation, and that script I really did like. But I think that the Oscar helped people to see me in this little film.

How old were you when you started acting?
I was thirteen when I went to my first acting class, in theatre, because I was biting my nails. Some shrink told my family: “That kid is very shy, “ so they put me in theatre classes. And I was there because I was biting my hands. […] Y’know, it’s very strange how things happen. I started falling in love with acting. While I was very shy in the classroom, I was not shy at all when I was up there.

Do you still bite your nails?
No. [Laughter] I don’t need to bite my nails anymore.

A number of Mexican actors are doing work in their home country but also here. Do you have interest in doing work in Colombia as well as the US?
Well, you can’t compare Mexico to Colombia. Mexico is so well developed in the film industry. Colombia, right now, is starting to develop…having new directors and new actors. And they’re fantastic. But we’re still, like, peddling. We’re still out there…they’re getting money…but I would love to go back there. Shooting in Cartagena was so much fun. To shoot a movie [in Bogota, where Moreno grew up] would be amazing. So hopefully with a good script, I will go back there.

When you saw yourself in age makeup, did you say, ‘This is what I’ll look like when I’m sixty’?
Oh, hell no! I don’t wanna look like that! No! I don’t wanna be sixty and a hundred pounds heavier. No, no no. […] When she’s old she’s let [herself] go because she’s not happy. I don’t wanna be that. I wanna be happy.

So it wasn’t frightening to see yourself….
No. It was cool. It was like dressing up.

Being the first U.S. film that’s shot in Colombia in the last 2 years, did you get a lot of stares, a lot of people trying to figure out what was going on…?
Oh, no. Everybody was so excited. Cartagena was another character for the film, the extras were another one. They were so happy and they were so helpful and they were so warm. They were working with us. They were not just extras.

What are you working on next?
I’m doing Che, with Steven Soderbergh. And I’m starting to shoot the end of this month. So I’m very excited about that.

What are you looking forward to about that shoot?
To have some guns. [Laughter] Actually, I went to boot camp…and, it was very funny because I was the only girl there. And they gave me an M1. It’s a big gun and everyone gets to shoot once. And I’m like, I don’t know how to grab this thing! […] It’s very different from what I’ve been doing. She’s [Guevara’s wife] very interesting because she’s was always right next to Che. So she knows a lot of things that nobody knows. Hopefully I’ll talk to her because she’s still alive. She’s in Cuba. I have so many questions about her as the woman. It must be very hard being in an environment full of men. And her and couple of other girls were very brave and very strong and I’d love to just talk to her about that.

On this movie, did you and the cast spend a lot of time together when you weren’t shooting?
Definitely. Because nobody was ‘home.’ I was at home. But they were not. So it was nice that after shooting we went out, had dinner…we just went out…and thank God everybody’s nice. Everybody’s really really nice.

I know this book, especially in Spanish, is considered a great work of literature. Can a movie do justice to a book like that…or should it do justice to a book like that. Since the medium of film is not the same. Should the movie try to mimic the book or be it’s own piece of work?
It depends. It’s so hard to put a book onto film. And sometimes when you do that a lot of people disagree and hate it. When you read a book, your own imagination is working. […] Your imagination is so much more full of life and colors and things, that when you see a movie like this a lot of people will appreciate it and a lot of people will hate it.

How was reading the book again knowing that you were going to be in the film compared to having read it just as a reader?
I concentrated more on my character. The way it describes Hildebranda. How she was walking, what was she thinking about. He’s so rich in his description and every single character is so rich. I went back to the book a lot of times…preparing.

What did you learn about her that you hadn’t realized before?
The first time I read the book I remember Fermina was going to her sister’s farm, but I didn’t care about her the first time. And then after I knew I was going to be her, I cared more. I noticed everything. I realized she was vibrant, sexy and funny. And she’s very rich. But before, you’re so concentrated on the love story that you don’t even care about other characters. So when I went back I found a totally different Hildebranda.

A lot of films don’t have much rehearsal time at all, I understand this one had two or three weeks. Does it help you get closer to the character or are you an actress who prefers to have a more organic experience?
I love, love, love rehearsals! Because you can make a lot of mistakes. In rehearsal, not on set. So you can do whatever you want. Mike is an actor’s director. He loves actors. And he directs so well and has an amazing sense of humor. That’s what you need in a director. He knew exactly what he was talking about. And he had read the book. If you saw Mike Newell after a scene or while we were having dinner, you’d see him right around the curb…just reading the book. He was not reading the book for work. He was reading the book because he wanted to. He wanted to get everything right.

from Reuters / by Michelle Nichols

Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno made her name swallowing heroin pellets in the hit “Maria Full of Grace” but chose to take a more relaxed approach to her latest movie role — by getting naked.

Although the 26-year-old earned a 2005 Oscar nomination for her film debut as a teen-age drug mule, her career has skirted mainstream Hollywood since then. That trend continues with her role as a young. carefree singer in “The Hottest State.”

In an effort to expand beyond serious characters, Sandino Moreno said she chose to play the heartbreaker in the film so she could just “have fun.”

The film, which follows the joy and pain of a first love, opens in major U.S. cities on Friday.

“I just wanted to go to the set feeling that I didn’t have to go to a slaughterhouse or swallow some pellets,” she said, referring to slaughterhouse visits for “Fast Food Nation,” an adaptation of a book on the U.S. fast food industry.

“I just wanted to go to have fun … to be relaxed,” Sandino Moreno told Reuters in an interview. “I just wanted to do something different, completely different to what I have been doing.”

She admits she struggled with her decision to strip down for the first time for sex scenes in “The Hottest State” before hitting upon a novel idea for image-conscious Hollywood — be yourself.

“I’m not perfect, I have this,” she said, grabbing her thighs. “Then I realized every time you watch a movie where a girl gets naked, it’s perfect, she’s a model and it’s not true. It’s not real.

“It was kind of like a big thing for me to just go for it, to take my clothes off and be me,” she said. “It was something that I really thought about, to do or not to do. Then I just said … I’ll do it. I’m normal, it’s not a big deal.”

“I EMBRACE IT. IT’S BEAUTIFUL”

The film industry’s obsession with beauty and skinny actresses hit home for Sandino Moreno when she attended the Cannes Film Festival last year and needed a dress to wear. She said she visited two designer suites in a bid to find an outfit.

“They just had model sizes, a (U.S.) 2 or a 4, and I’m a 6. I don’t think I am overweight,” Sandino Moreno said. “I’m not that skinny, I will never be that skinny. So it was kind of weird.”

“But I will never be like that, it’s impossible, it’s in my genes, it’s in my blood. This is not fat, this is like my bones, it’s there and I embrace it. It’s beautiful,” she said.

Sandino Moreno portrays a singer-songwriter named Sarah who becomes the first love for 20-year-old William, played by Mark Webber. Actor-director Ethan Hawke adapted the film from his own novel of the same name.

The actress lip syncs to another voice in the movie because time constraints prevented her from recording songs herself, and she said a music career is definitely not something she wants to pursue — she plans to stick to acting.

“I just think you have to be good at one thing. You just have to learn that craft,” said Sandino Moreno, who recently completed “Love in the Time of Cholera,” which is due to be released in November. “I’m not going to launch any perfumes and I’m not going to start singing.”

from New York Magazine / by Logan Hill

In Ethan Hawke’s film of his novel The Hottest State, Catalina Sandino Moreno finally plays a woman who doesn’t have to sneak into the country, as she did in Maria Full of Grace and Fast Food Nation—here she’s a New York singer who falls for a scruffy white guy (Mark Webber). She spoke with Logan Hill.

So, this is something of a change for you.
It was a break from being a drug mule, or working in a slaughterhouse. It’s actually the closest thing to who I am. Scripts I’ve been getting were for the part of some typical black-hair, black-eyes, brown-skin Latina. I didn’t see that girl here.

Guess your Oscar nomination hasn’t changed the roles you get offered.
I thought it might, but I was very wrong.

Were you looking to do a romance?
I don’t go to see romantic movies. People kissing, I don’t like that.

The Hottest State is more about falling out of love, anyway.
Yes, she’s just a kid, realizing that she can be fine in New York without anyone. I wouldn’t want to play the girlfriend-of, that would be boring. If anything, [Webber] is the boyfriend-of.

How do you try to avoid being typecast?
I’m very patient. I haven’t worked in six months, since I finished Love in the Time of Cholera [opening this fall]. I passed on some things. Then I got Che [she plays his wife] with Steven Soderbergh.

As a Colombian, were you particularly excited about the Márquez movie?
When I was in high school, the book made me cry. When I read it again, it made me cry. And to shoot it in Colombia? That’s the advertising we need.

The country does get a pretty bad rap.
You know, we were going to Bosnia for Maria Full of Grace, and I was thinking, There are gonna be Serbs and they’re gonna kill me! But I found a beautiful, peaceful country. Then I told a Bosnian girl that I was from Colombia, and she said, “Oh my God! How scary to be in Colombia! As soon as I get off the plane, they’re going to kidnap me!” So, my hand on my heart: Go to Colombia—nothing’s going to happen to you.

from Orange.co.uk

We talk to Catalina Sandino Moreno about Fast Food Nation and upcoming Ethan Hawke project The Hottest State

Do you eat meat, Catalina? ~
Catalina Sandino Moreno: I stopped eating meat once when I got a big steak and I opened it and it was just like an artery and it was just full of blood. I decided not to eat meat after that – it just grossed me out.

And did Richard Linklater come to you or did you have to chase this movie role?
Catalina: No I got the script and then the next day I was like ‘I really need to do this’. I went to meet him and I wanted to let him know that I can do this and I want to do this and I will give 100% to this project. So I met him and I got it.

Were you surprised to find something you were so passionate about?
Catalina: I was very excited to just find a project. With many scripts I can read them and if I don’t like it I just don’t keep reading. Sometimes I just turn three pages and I’m like, ‘No, thank you! I’m not going to read anymore. I’m not going to waste my time.’ But with this script it was a page-turner. That’s why I had to read the book because I didn’t understand why or if these things were real and then Eric Schlosser, the writer, dissects everything. It was a very interesting way to relate to the world going from the script to the book and from the book to the script.

Do you think the film is trying to dictate what people should or shouldn’t eat?
Catalina: I don’t think this movie is just for the fast food industry. This movie doesn’t tell you, ‘Don’t eat more fast food’, or who’s a bad guy or who’s a good guy. I just think that this is a movie that everyone can react to in different ways. Everyone can take anything from the movie because it’s an open movie this doesn’t tell you what’s bad and what’s good. It just tells you what’s happening and I think you need to know this and it’s your right to know how things are functioning.

Does that bother you about working for studios?
Catalina: For me, I just feel very proud of this movie. From the first time that I read the script I thought it was an important thing to tell people. I think everyone has the right to know what’s in their food. I feel happy that Richard gave me the chance to put a face and a voice and a body to this girl that just wants a better life and will do whatever it takes to take care of her family.

Some scenes were quite disgusting to watch. Was it the same to shoot?
Catalina: You know I’m an actress who likes to feel the heat. So I was so happy that we were going to be shooting in that slaughterhouse because I could be able to touch and I was touching and testing. My job was to take the shit out of intestines and clean it and then after you do that you just drop it in a bucket.

I was doing that for the last part of the film and for my character it was perfect because I’ve never been to a slaughterhouse. I didn’t go to a slaughterhouse before to see what it was like or how cows were killed. I waited until the shoot, and it was a very shocking scene. We went there and the line was moving and you can just see these big things – I don’t know what they were they were just big pieces of insides. It was easier for me to do that because sometimes when you’re shooting a movie you have so many little surprises that you just have to be surprised yourself. You know what you’re character’s going to do, you know how you’re going to end but if you take those decisions not to do things before and just surprise yourself you will look real and that’s what I did.

Did your involvement with Ethan Hawke’s next project The Hottest State come about after making Fast Food Nation together?
Catalina: No, I met Ethan at the Oscars the year that I was there. He was with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy. I met him very briefly and then I went to New York to see Hurlyburly and then I met him there again. He told me that he had a script and he wanted me to read it and it was a romantic story and I was a little scared because I’m not a romantic person myself so I said, OK, I’ll read it, of course.’ And I read it and I think it was a point in my life where I was very vulnerable and I loved it.

from Guardian Unlimited / by Ed Pilkington

In Richard Linklater’s new film, Fast Food Nation, fans of Anthony Hopkins’ butchery of a prison guard in Silence of the Lambs are in for a treat. In the last five minutes of the movie several cows are subjected to similar processing: first they are stunned and hung up, still writhing, before their throats are slit. Then their limbs are hacked off one by one, and they are skinned. Finally their entrails are disgorged and sent blobbing down a chute, like oversized jellyfish. It’s not a pleasant scene, and it is all the more disconcerting because in the middle of all the gore and spouting blood, a beautiful woman is standing. Her pale face is splattered red and her eyes are dilated with an expression of deep shock.

The woman is the Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno, and her traumatised appearance is not merely testament to her acting. The passage was shot as if live, capturing her first experience of the inside of a slaughterhouse. “I didn’t want to go in just to see, I wanted to do it with the camera rolling. I’d been warned there would be lots of blood, but it was still very shocking. One minute we were driving through the countryside watching cows eating grass and having fun. Then suddenly we were inside and there is the cow hanging upside down, its eyes still blinking. Then here’s another one, and another one - it’s like a machine, and the workers were like robots, not talking to each other, just killing, killing, killing.”

Sandino Moreno is no stranger to the role of young Hispanic woman thrown wide-eyed into the centre of gruesome events. She burst into view in 2004 - grabbing an Oscar nomination for best actress as she did so - in her first movie, Maria Full of Grace, in which she played a Colombian drug mule to the United States. In a memorable scene - similarly shot without any prior preparation - she swallows several packages of white powder wrapped in condoms, her neck distending as the boluses go down.

Like Maria, Fast Food Nation focuses on the irresistible lure of the great power to the north for Hispanic immigrants who are seeking to build a new life, and who are prepared to take terrible risks to do so. A docu-drama based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Eric Schlosser, who co-wrote the script with Linklater, it follows the hopefuls as they make their perilous border crossing only to be rewarded with dangerous and low-paid work in the meat processing plants of Colorado. Fast Food Nation goes one stage further than Maria in that it also explores the impact of the rush for fast-food profits on the existing US population: the suppressed wages, the environmental degradation and, above all, the literally shitty food - the burgers are contaminated with cow faeces.

It has been three years since Maria Full of Grace, and Sandino Moreno had starred in just two other films in the interim, and one of those was a short-role in a portmanteau movie. She accounts for her low work-rate by saying she was waiting for another script with a message. The huge success of Maria had taken everybody - including its debutant director, Joshua Marston, and equally green lead actress - utterly by surprise. With the benefits of such success, she says, came a growing sense of responsibility to stick with what she calls “socially powerful” cinema. “When I was travelling to all these festivals I realised how people were reacting to Maria and how many were grateful to us for making it. When we showed the movie in New York a lot of people who came were Colombians wanting to remember back home - it was so great to be in the theatre surrounded by people from Bogota, Cali, Medellin, Pereira. After that, I really wanted to concentrate on a new project that was as powerful.”

Maria rocketed her, in a matter of months, from an utterly unknown amateur actor to the Oscars. When Marston came knocking at her door, she was training to be an advertising executive; her biggest ambition in life was to “be put on a campaign selling spoons”. She went along with the movie, she said, simply because she thought it would be a “fun ride”, never expecting it to go beyond a limited release on pay TV. That she has enjoyed such a short-cut to stardom is in itself a reflection of the wider boom in interest in Latin-American film. Though Latin-America has been making movies for as long as Hollywood, it is only recently that the output has been recognised among the mass cinema-going audience in the US. Its new status is partly, perhaps, because of the rising demographic importance of America’s Hispanic population, and partly because of the wealth of talent emerging from the new generation of Hispanic film-makers.

Fernando Meirelles opened the floodgates with his 2004 Oscar nomination for best director with City of God, and others have rushed in behind him. By the time Sandino Moreno took her seat at the Oscars the following year, she was joined at other tables by the three rising stars of Mexican cinema: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro. “It was amazing to see those guys up there, and they’ve come on a lot since then. Alfonso Cuarón has grown so much as a director, and del Toro, who has always been so dark, the hard boy of Mexican cinema, suddenly produces this movie [Pan’s Labyrinth] that is so beautiful, it just flies.”

The paradox about Sandino Moreno herself is that, having made two films with strong storylines involving young Hispanic women being sucked from their own countries to the American economic powerhouse, she has herself followed the same trajectory. Her biography reads like a version - albeit a comfortable, middle-class one - of El Norte, the celebrated 1983 movie about the long journey of Latino immigrants to the US.

Certainly, her relocation to New York has been legal and relatively pain-free. Her upbringing in a family of doctors and her education in a British school means she is at home in her present neighbourhood, Manhattan’s upper east side, as she is back home in Bogota. There was no swallowing of boluses when she flew into JFK. But the economic imperative for a young actor to be in America is little different, I suggest to her, than that of Sylvia, the illegal immigrant she plays in Fast Food Nation. Although since Maria she has become one of the foremost Latin-American actors of her generation, almost all the movies she has appeared in have been directed by North American film-makers, including the soon-to-be-released The Hottest State, a romance directed by Ethan Hawke. The only exceptions have been a five-minute segment of the portmanteau movie Paris, Je T’Aime, directed by the Brazilian Walter Salles, and the forthcoming period piece Heart of the Earth by the Spanish director Antonio Cuadri.

In response she insists that she still harbours ambitions to make films in Spanish and with top Latin-American directors. “That’s my priority, and it would be stupid to cut myself off from that, to say, ‘I’m living in New York and I’m only going to make American movies’. No, not at all. There are so many intelligent film-makers working in Latin America, in Colombia.”

Another upcoming film saw her return to Colombia for the shooting of Mike Newell’s interpretation of Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the novel by her compatriot Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The two months spent on location in the port of Cartagena gave her the rare chance to exhibit her home to the wider world. “We shot the film where Márquez wrote the book - Cartagena is like another character in the film: its presence is always felt. I felt so proud while I was there, showing off my beautiful home to my colleagues.” Being back in Colombia, she says, also gave her exposure to the healthy influence of her strong family, particularly her mother who she says keeps her grounded despite a heady rise. “Every time I spoke to my mother she would tell me to remember where I was, to control my life and not to let any of these things effect who I am.”

That’s not quite the reaction, though, of her grandmother, who has filled her house in Bogota with pictures of Catalina and is forever distributing DVDs of her to her elderly friends. “Her house is like a museum,” Sandino Moreno says. With Fast Food Nation, Heart of the Earth, the Hottest State and Love in the Time of Cholera all to be released in quick succession, the one-time advertising trainee from Bogota is going to be much in view this year. Her grandmother has a busy few months ahead.

· Fast Food Nation is on general release.