The US-Colombian 2004 HBO drama film Maria Full of Grace written and directed by Joshua Marston is an excellent early 2000s naturalistic international arthouse film.
It follows Colombian teenage girl Maria Álvarez, who is unsatisfied with her poor life situation and agrees to take on the job of a drug mule. The dramatic structure is very well thought out and the unfolding situations feel natural and are still gripping after several views.
The film is one of the earliest I’ve found that features the now standard arthouse ingredients of naturalistic film: documentary style handheld camera, dialogue in original language, unknown actors, realistic settings and no or nearly no use of musical score.
The film also bears a strong resemblance to the also excellent Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always of 2020 with its feminist story: A young girl, living in a bad surrounding, toxic masculinity, teenage pregnancy, going on a trip to New York with a female friend, having no place to stay, visiting a pregnancy clinic, etc.
On review aggregator site Metacritic Never, Rarely received a huge amount of negative user reviews based on its abortion thematic and depiction of abusive male characters. Astonishingly I noticed that Maria Full of Grace also got lots of negative user reviews. So it is not only their narrative structure and feminist storyline that the two films share but also the hate of a certain group of people who get very angry when presented with this perspective.
