Films

I saw Maria Full of Grace last night. An excellent film and one of those movies where the realism makes watching the movie a gut-wrenchingly intense experience.

Stylistically, Maria Full of Grace reminded me deeply of Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist, in also being focussed on a teenage woman who is determined/stubborn yet confused who finds herself in a "strange" predicament (partially of her own creation) and entirely left to her own means to grapple with deep decisions about motherhood in these circumstances. In both films, the intense focus on the central characters, almost as if the camera were attached to their faces at every moment of the film, was like a connection right into their souls.

However, with respect to it's didactic intent the film is considerably closer to Dirty Pretty Things i.e. Exploitation of The Desperate in/from developing countries in the Trafficking "business" for the Developed World (drugs, organs, etc). While this is an obtrusive theme in Dirty Pretty Things, it does not interfere with the film in Maria Full of Grace.