Glance at the subtle poster for “Maria, Full of Grace,” and you’ll see Maria’s eyes, gazing upwards, and you’ll see the foggy sliver of light filtering across her face, and you just might notice that she is being handed something from where she looks, something white and small, and, knowing all of that, you might conclude (as I did) that whatever it is that she is looking towards is precisely the vehicle which fills Maria with the aforementioned grace. You might ignore the white circle altogether (as I did), instead focusing on the man’s hand that holds it. On your way out of the theater, you might look at it again, and you might notice (as I did) that she is holding her mouth prone to the sky to receive a latex-wrapped pellet of heroin.

“Maria” is the first feature from filmmaker Joshua Marston. He snagged the Dramatic Audience Award in Sundance 2004 and transformed this success into a nationwide release from Fine Line Features and HBO films. Marston certainly did his homework, and it shows. Inspired by the stories of the Columbians in his Brooklyn neighborhood, Marston set out to tell the story they seemed to miss in “Traffic,” visiting custom officials at JFK, speaking to former drug mules and their families, and questioning a surgeon who had extensive experience surgically removing the drug pellets from women who had been contaminated by an break in the seal.

Marston filtered this wealth of information into a single story, a single girl, and it’s a story that seems to speak to anyone who’s ever had an untainted dream, anyone who has straddled the balance between right and wrong, and asked themselves what they would give up—their health? their family? the law?—in exchange for the money that would open a door to a better life.

Catalina Sandino Moreno plays Maria, our heroine, simultaneously naive and tough, earnest and skeptical, a wise-beyond-her-years and recently pregnant 17-year-old. In one of many scenes in the film which Americans would prefer to think fictional, Maria quits her job as a de-thorner at the rose plantation, when she is denied a bathroom break and punished for then throwing up on the flowers from her morning sickness. She quits and thus wins our approval; she stands up for herself, doing all that she can, and Moreno is brilliant at revealing the heartbreaking immobility that characterizes many female lives in Columbia. Her family depends on her income and is furious, and thus she is led to her next job; a drug mule. The job will take her across the United States border and thrust her into a world that looks nothing like the American Dream—a world where girls like her risk death for a dollar.

The film narrows an epidemic into a human being, and Moreno, with her repotiore of poker faces, takes on the weight of history and does it justice. Like any adventure tale, Maria is forced to face death, imprisonment, abandonment and illness to reach her goals. And like any action hero, the audience is rooting for her, gasping when something goes wrong, collectively sighing when something finally goes right.

The documentary-esque reality of the film is compounded by the presence of real-life “Mayor of Little Colombia,” Orlando Tobon, who works from his Queens travel agency to help immigrants and the families of lost drug mules. Tobon plays a man like himself, “Don Fernando,” the unlikely angel, a man so good you are relived to discover that he exists.

Marston paints America and Columbia as diabolical states; in Columbia, Maria has family, love, and connections, but there is no opportunity. In America, the land of opportunity, it is painful to watch as she desperately searches for any hint of prosperity in this densely populated country—she is stranded, a victim without family, love, or connections, a victim in a strange and seemingly unforgiving society. Perhaps that is when the film strikes the most painful chord—in a city like New York, crowded with people, filled with as many good Samaritans as there are bad ones, Maria struggles to find one single soul to connect with, one person to help her navigate in a strange land.

Ultimately, “Maria” unearths a national tragedy with intelligence and compassion, and it builds a stronger case for social activism than the oft-challenged “Fahrenheit 911” ever could, and her fictional tale feels far more true than Moore’s documentary. After all, this movie is about a country, not just a person, and it’s a country that puts together our shoes, processes our meat, builds our cars, harvests our drugs and, yes, de-thorns our roses. It is far too easy to ignore what we cannot see in our devastatingly unequal society. It seems that as long as there are girls in need of money and Americans in need of drugs, the system will live on. And, as long as American law officials catch the captured mules themselves and rarely the dealers that sent them, those dealers will find far and far more dangerous methods to transport their goods. For now, one country remains submissive to the other, all the time still poor, still sad, and perhaps, always hoping for someone to notice and for someone to close the unreasonable gap that continues to grow between societies of human beings.