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Imelda In the signature sequence of Maria Full of Grace, the eponymous heroine, a Colombian drug mule, swallows several dozen condoms stuffed with heroin pellets. If one breaks in her stomach, it will kill her. She has never done this before, and her horror is tangible—perhaps because, before shooting the scene, Catalina Sandino Moreno had never swallowed or even seen one of the enormous pellets either. (The pellets Sandino downed contained sugar.) Rather than rehearse or talk to women who had been drug mules, Sandino went in unprepared on purpose, because, she says, "Maria didn't know anything about it when she did it."

This bold choice was the correct one. Sandino does not so much act her role as experience it. The beautiful 17-year-old Maria is a universal adolescent—petulant, proud, innocent, willful, sexy, reserved, angry yet dutiful to her exploitative family. Above all, there moves in her a sort of inchoate idealism, a need to do the right thing, that carries her through the film's frightening chain of events.

Precisely because Sandino approaches every moment onscreen as she does the drug-swallowing scene—with eyes wide open—writer-director Joshua Marston is able to evade sentimentality. He trusts his actress's instincts, and that encourages the audience to do the same.

Sandino, 23, had to trust her instincts too. All she has in common with Maria is a Colombian passport. The actress is the daughter of a pathologist and a veterinarian and was raised in middle-class privilege in Bogotá. Her only previous acting experience was in amateur productions, and Marston, who had interviewed hundreds of young women in the U.S. and Colombia for the role, chose her as a last hope after seeing her audition tape.

While she did the heroin-pellet scene blind, she threw herself into the research otherwise. She even took a job cutting roses in a flower factory, as Maria does in the movie. "After two weeks, I understood her frustration"—which was not just with the job or with her family's lack of appreciation for her sacrifice or with her loser boyfriend. "You don't have anybody to lean on," says Sandino. "I understood why she wanted to leave"—however dangerous the circumstances.

Sandino has been careful in capitalizing on her success. She now lives quietly in Manhattan, where she is studying the dozens of scripts that have flowed her way since Maria opened last summer. But too many of the offers are for maids and "spicy" Latinas. "I'm not spicy at all," she says. "I'm about jeans and T shirts, and I don't use high heels." She would like to work for Pedro Almodóvar or Alejandro Amenábar or, failing a Spanish connection, in an action movie like House of Flying Daggers. Whatever she chooses, you can be certain that Sandino will do it with the clarity and force that made her Maria the year's most insinuating and touching performance.

—R.S.
With reporting by Carolina A. Miranda