100% Colombian

Sitting smiling to herself in a London hotel, Catalina Sandino Moreno is nothing if not radiant. Aside from being a very prepossessing sort of girl in the first place, she wears the delighted air of someone who can’t quite believe what’s happening around her – sort of like a cat who landed on her feet, got the cream and inherited some crazy lady’s vast mansion.
 
Well, for a kid from cow country in Colombia who had only ever dabbled in amateur dramatics at a community theatre, I suppose she is doing rather well. Since she was selected from thousands of girls for the title role in Maria Full Of Grace, the 23 year old actress has moved to New York, won the Best Actress Award at Berlin and been deservedly nominated for an Oscar.
That’s hardly surprising given the meatiness of her debut role. Maria Full Of Grace, a thrilling yet gritty film from first time writer-director Joshua Marston, centres on a going-nowhere-slowly seventeen year old in the Colombian backwater town of Bogota.
A feisty and bright young woman, Ms. Moreno’s Maria is less than satisfied with her circumscribed life in a horticultural sweatshop and once she falls pregnant to her deadbeat boyfriend, she takes the only way out available and becomes a US bound intestinal drug mule.
Though I wouldn’t dream of quibbling with Joshua Marston’s extensive research into Colombian drug smuggling or his very Loachian sense of social realism, can life really be so prescribed in rural Colombia ?
“Oh yes,” nods Catalina. “Where I grew up we had crops and cattle, so it was farm-work if you were lucky. Economically, it’s hopeless or very hard. Especially for the people outside Bogota because of the drug wars. There is fighting about marijuana and cocaine and then the government will spray the crops, and that destroys all the farm land, and because the soil is spoiled you can’t start again.”
Catalina has obviously become the exception that proves the rule, hence her aforementioned blissful demeanor. Currently, she resides in New York and is attending theatre school.
 “It has always been my dream to be an actress,” she smiles. “I always wanted to go to New York to acting school because we only have little acting schools in Colombia. I was saving money all the time I was at school, but I realised I would never have enough money to go to New York. My mother said ‘You are crazy. You have to be real. You will never be able to go there so put it out of your head’. And then this movie came and dragged me to New York. And before the movie came out I decided to stay there because this had always been my dream. Now I spend all my time on the phone to my family telling them where I’m going and what I’m doing. They are as excited as me and even when I’m not in Colombia, I’m always in Colombia, you know? Because in America they don’t have the same sense of family and I always miss that.”
She’s also keen to emphasise her debt to Joshua Marston’s script and her spiky screen alter-ego – “I loved playing Maria because she’s is hard-headed and determined. She’s brave. She’s a warrior. She doesn’t have a lot of options because she knows she’s going to change her life. She’s not at all like me. I have too many options I think. I never know what I’m doing from one minute to the next!” And then just when you think Ms. Moreno can’t look any happier, she erupts into a particularly charming fit of the giggles. “It’s true. I’m hopeless. I stand around wondering what to do next all the time.”
 Happily, Catalina’s currently too busy jet-setting between film festivals on behalf of the film to let her indecision problem get her down. “My favourite place has been Sarajevo. It was just so wonderful. I never in my whole life imagined I would be there. And when I told my mom I was going to Bosnia she was terrified! She was saying ‘Oh my God, Bosnia must be so dangerous.’ But everyone there kept coming up to me and saying ‘Oh my God, you’re from Colombia. That must be so dangerous.' And I’m like ‘Look around you! At least we don’t have holes where our houses used to be!’”

Maria Full Of Grace is released March 25th.