Jill Berdys-Billardello
Professor Ramos
INTL 2000
7 February 2015
“Maria Full of Grace” is a movie about a young woman who lives in a three generation all female household that is desperately trying to break the cycle of how these Colombian women live their expected lives. Maria is a feisty seventeen year old that works in a rose plantation and is expected to financially contribute to her family as well as her sister who is an unemployed single mother. She wants out and unfortunately is pulled into the drug world by becoming a “mule” or “drug carrier” in order to financially secure herself and family. The twist to the movie is that Maria is pregnant and she only tells the father who has no interest in her or helping. So, she’s basically left all alone to figure out how to provide a better life on her own.
The most desirable character in this movie is most definitely Maria. From the beginning you can tell she wants more from her life other than what she watched her grandmother and mother go through. Working in the rose plantation gives the viewer a first glimpse of her thorough disgust for doing this manual labor for menial wages and no respect whatsoever from her boss. At one point while discovering that she was pregnant, she had to succumb to her boss’s ability to approve or deny her to leave her work post to use the restroom because of morning sickness. When she discards all over the roses she was prepping, he then denies her the use of the restroom and makes her clean every last inch of the soiled roses. How different is this scenario in modern times to what the slaves went through on the other types of plantations during their time period?
Next was the scene where she is with Juan, her boyfriend, having some relations and there is a shot where she is looking up at the sky totally ignoring what he’s doing. She’s seeing that there is a whole world