There's more than one way to tackle drug crime in moviedom, but few films manage to escape the binary characterizations of rugged cops battling smarmy evil-doers with all the requisite gun battles and car chases. Stephen Soderburgh's Traffic managed to do something different, tracing a line from poverty stricken Mexican locales to affluent U.S. families to underscore the ineffectualness of the War On Drugs. Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant had a good-and-evil battle of biblical proportions raging inside one desperate man, Harvey Karteil's vice-ridden, junkie cop. Then there was Ron Mann who said pass the bong in his marijuana propaganda doc Grass.

Maria, Full of Grace, focuses on a Colombian seventeen-year-old, Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who takes one of the most dangerous, and surely highest risk to low reward, jobs in the drugs trafficking industry. She becomes a "mule", a drug courier who to avoid detection carries the illicit substances in her stomach. She runs the risk of not only a stiff prison sentence if caught, but death if one of the plastic-wrapped pellets breaks in flight. As the film shows, these couriers are often peasant women driven to crime by harsh economic circumstances.

When Maria has a run-in with her unsympathetic boss, she angrily quits her dead-end job as a rose de-thorner. This sets her at bitter odds with her family - a mother, grandmother, and unmarried sister - who rely on her income. Her sense of desperation increases on breaking the news that she is pregnant to her immature boyfriend. He, out of duty rather than any semblance of passion, tells her she "has to" marry him now. But the feisty Maria insists that she has no intention of being trapped in a loveless marriage.

Maria's new career comes almost by accident. An out-of-town boy who she dances with at a party offers her an opportunity to earn a small fortune (in Maria's terms), with one short flight. There is but a flicker of doubt across her face before she accepts it. Morality doesn't get a look-in, she needs the money. The risks are clear though, as we see when Maria later berates her best friend for becoming a mule too.

The tension builds as Maria is interviewed by an avuncular, head mule-handler in a taverna back-room and she gets some instruction in swallowing pellets through Lucy, an elegant woman who has done drugs run twice before. With almost documentary exactness the film details how the drugs are packaged and prepared. We also see Maria down 62 of the plastic-sealed pellets with sips of soup and her mule-handler massaging her stomach to move his merchandise into place.

The flight to New York itself is a tense affair, and although Maria proves to be a cool customer, things do not go as smoothly as planned.

Debuting writer-director Joshua Marston's decision to focus on the human drama, in particular one woman's story, pays off. Maria is a fascinating mix of the stubborn and assertive and yet also vulnerable and generous of spirit. The well-chosen Hispanic cast and intelligent script help create a strong air of credibility, but it is Moreno's ability as Maria to convey the internal struggle of emotions and motivations, often without words, that gives the film its power. The film doesn't gloss over the violent nature of the drugs industry, but its sympathetic portrait of the mules is quietly provocative.