It is no surprise that Real Women Have Curves, a small Indie film, was the hit of the Sundance Film Festival and a once unknown teenage actress, America Ferrera, is receiving a substantial amount of attention. Beautiful, intelligent and confident, Ferrera seems at home in a West Hollywood hotel lobby discussing the parallels between her own experiences as a Latino adolescent growing up in Los Angeles and those of Ana, the character she plays so effortlessly in her first film, Real Women Have Curves. "The obvious parallel is the whole body image question", she says, as she plays a character who defies convention, in Hollywood terms, not as physically 'flawless' as the norm. "Ana is growing up with a generation that is so obsessed with image and having the perfect body, looking and dressing like a pop star. As an actor, you're kind of expected to submit to that and almost to lead that 'cult' almost. Getting the opportunity to counteract that was attractive." The film is about an ordinary teenager, in this case a Mexican-American, girl from East L.A. torn between working at her sister's dress factory and accepting a full-paid scholarship to Columbia University against her parents' wishes. Apart from Ana's body image issue, Ferrera responded to another theme of this film. "My pursuit as an actor parallels Ana's pursuits to go to college. She didn't have the support of her family, especially her mom, and for me, as an actress I never had any support or had anyone telling me: You can do it or you can make it. More often I heard that it's impossible or hard with a lot of that coming from my mom discouraging me and pointing me towards education." While her mother, an immigrant from Honduras, did not want the youngest of her six children (all but one of whom are girls) to pursue acting, Ferrera did it anyway. She took an acting class and began auditioning for commercials, to no avail. She doesn't recall where that need for her to act came from, only realising "that it's something that's inside. I'm a very expressive person and can express myself well. So I choose to use acting as a medium to make a change and effect people." When she was 8, acting "was an outlet and somewhere where I felt like I fit in. Kids are always searching for something where they think they belong and for me it was the drama club or on the stage. It was there that I felt that people could understand me. Latin people in particular are not encouraged to be very emotionally expressive people, just animated," explains Ferrera. "We're very animated but not a lot of communication goes on between parents and kids."

So Ferrera felt that she understood Ana in Real Women, who considers herself an outsider, much like Ferrera. "When I was a teenager, I wasn't Mexican enough to be hanging out with the Latin kids or White enough to be hanging out with the White kids. I was in this kind of No Man's Land." Being an actor has helped America fit in to a degree and this film seems tailor made for her. Her mother, who supervises housekeeping services in major hotels, feels better about her daughter's acting. "She's a lot better about it especially since I'm going off to university". In January, Ferrera heads to USC to study Theatre and International Relations. She is studying the latter "because I am amazed just how ignorant Americans are of the world outside this country. I don't want to be one of those."

She is currently going all out to tell anyone who will listen why it is important to see her starring role in Real Women Have Curves, insisting that is far broader than its Latin themes might superficially suggest. "The one thing about this movie is that it is a very real portrayal of an immigrant family's life. Family is the essence of Latin culture, I think, because family is supposed to take care of family. And that's kind of the sense you get in the movie. The mother feels almost betrayed, like the daughter is giving up on her family. They need her help and she's being selfish in a way by giving up on them. When I leave this movie, Ana's weight problem is the last thing on my mind because there's so much more to the story. It's ultimately about loving yourself. Obviously in our society where you turn on the TV and all you see is diet pills! And a new diet plan! And exercise stuff! And, oh, how to get down to a size 0 in two days! It's such an apparent thing. To make a movie about reality and not factor that in is almost impossible. This is a movie about real life, not just about a Latin family."

Real Women Have Curves opens in NY, LA and San Diego this Friday, wider from the 25TH.