from Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service / by Steven Rea

As a Colombian, and a sophisticated, big-city college student, Catalina Sandino Moreno had a pretty good idea what a drug mule was. She’d seen the newspaper stories, watched the TV reports.

“Sometimes they’re caught smuggling drugs to the United States,” she says. “They’re jailed. They’re bad people. It was a very superficial portrait, and that’s what I believed.”

No more. Two years ago, Moreno, who was studying advertising at a Bogota university but had long harbored a love of the theater, auditioned for a film _ to be made in Colombia, but written and directed by an American, Joshua Marston.

Moreno landed the title role over 800-plus women _ professional actresses, students, laborers, Colombians living in the States. In the devastatingly good “Maria Full of Grace,” she plays a poor country girl who, desperate for money, agrees to ingest pellets of heroin, fly to New York and deliver them to a dealer. A strong-willed and resourceful young woman, Moreno’s character is not an evil criminal, not a greedy drug runner. She’s just a girl trying to find a way to freedom.

“I had no idea of this whole aspect of the drug wars. Like, who are they?,” says the actress, in town recently along with her director, Marston. “But when I read the script, the story of Maria, I saw it’s a totally different thing. … Now I could be a drug mule. I knew that the person has to be in a very extreme situation just to think of doing that. There is great desperation behind the decision for them to make this trip. It’s incredibly dangerous.”

And it’s not just the danger of being caught, it’s the possibility that one of the 60 or so rubber-wrapped pellets could break in the carrier’s stomach and result in death.

“I wouldn’t say it’s based on any one story,” says Marston, 35, who lives and works in New York. “But it’s definitely inspired by a conversation that I had with someone who had traveled as a mule. … It was obviously a very compelling story, and I came to it at a point where I was already very interested in Colombia. I had been following news from Colombia for years, and had also been interested in the drug wars, and wanted to do something on the drug war, and something on the immigrant experience.”

Ironically, after research trips to Bogota and scouting locations in outlying villages, Marston and cast and crew were forced to shoot the first half of the film in neighboring Ecuador. “It was just before the presidential elections and it got a little too heated up,” he explains. “There were bombs going off. It was impossible to get production insurance.”

The second half of the story takes place in New York, predominantly in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, also known as “Little Colombia.”

Winner of the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January, “Maria Full of Grace” is in Spanish, which Marston speaks fluently, although he wrote the original drafts in English.

“My Spanish wasn’t colloquial enough that it made sense. Eventually, I translated it with a Colombian friend into sort of neutral Spanish … and it wasn’t until I started working with the actors that the language became very specific. There was a lot of improvisation. Some of the best lines came from Catalina and the other actors, working together.”

After completing the film in late 2002, Moreno moved to New York City. She has an agent, she’s been taking acting classes, she’s here to stay.

“I’ve been to Colombia a lot of times in the last two years, but I’m staying in New York for work,” she reports. “I think New York’s an incredible city. Why should I go back to Colombia to study advertising if I have this incredible movie and I have a lot of opportunities that I didn’t have in Colombia?”