Maria Full of Grace - 6

This film is about a teenage Columbian girl who needs a job, and is courageous enough to become a mule (someone who swallows cocaine pellets to smuggle them through customs). The film has many twist and turns due to Maria's sense of responsibility amid her often bad choices. She enters the work of a mule very naive but ends up gaining a lot of knowledge about the world and how she can make better choices for a better future.
The characters of Maria (as well as Che, in The Motorcycle Diaries-see below) reminded me of a quote I have read by the British philosopher/novelist Iris Murdoch. In The Sovereignty of Good she writes about the connections of choices and the moral life: "... if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. I would like on the whole to use the word 'attention' as a good word and use some more general term like 'looking' as the neutral word. Of course psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world, complete with systematic vocabulary. . . . Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion."
In both of these films you can see the flow of choices that the characters make and how it changes their views of what the world is.