Morality player; Catalina Sandino Moreno has a thing for roles that tweak our conscience.

Byline: Jane Herman

One wouldn't think that Catalina Sandino Moreno's nuanced portrayal of a pregnant drug smuggler in the 2004 film Maria Full of Grace, which won her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, would lead to offers to play sexy Latina femmes fatales-but it did. For two years Moreno held out for better things. Her role in Paris, je t'aime, premiering at Cannes this month, is one of them.

A montage of five-minute shorts, Paris, je t'aime is an experiment in collective filmmaking that explores a single topic-love in the City of Light. In the segment directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, Moreno is Anna, a single immigrant mother forced to work as an au pair for a wealthy family in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Once again, she has found a way to humanize a stereotype. "She's so conflicted," says Moreno, "having to leave her own child to raise someone else's in a foreign country where she barely speaks the language. But she's strong, and she does it with grace. It's real life, and I love that."

Moreno is ...