Those moments of divine inspiration, aren’t always easy to come by…

Based on a true story, Fatima is the kind of faith based movie that we’ve seen before with one exception.  It isn’t trying to be “preachy” and it stays true the power of the moment and the event that this story chronicles…

In 1917, outside the parish of Fátima, Portugal, a 10-year-old girl and her two younger cousins witness multiple visitations of the Virgin Mary, who tells them that only prayer and suffering will bring an end to World War I. As secularist government officials and Church leaders try to force the children to recant their story, word of the sighting spreads across the country, inspiring religious pilgrims to flock to the site in hopes of witnessing a miracle. What they experience will transform their quiet lives and bring the attention of a world yearning for peace.

It’s a tricky thing to navigate when dealing with faith based movies as things can devolve and not really allow for any kind of genuine story or character, however here with Fatima we get a real sense of balanced honesty as it recounts a story that can’t necessarily be explained but actually happened.

Noted cinematographer Marco Pontecorvo slides into the director chair here with some solid results as we get a story that isn’t trying to pound us into submission in regards to faith or any kind of faith based issues, but just recapping an event that happened.  The movie flows and looks quite good allows us to get invested in the spirit of the story, which is really the point as it almost acts as a fable or passage from the bible.  Sure these events happened but the allegorical message in it all is substantially more important then what actually took place.  There’s not necessarily any big time character development throughout the film, but that’s actually OK and Pontecorvo allows these events and the time that they are happening in to take the centre stage because while the people are important, it’s the general sense of wanting for a better life in the tail end of the first world war and the brink of the Spanish Flu.  The film conveys a sense of realism with a nugget of hope wrapped up inside of it.

With a loaded international cast that includes the likes of Sonia Braga, Goran Visjic, Harvey Keitel, Joaquin de Almeida and Alba Baptista, everyone is playing there parts to perfection.  It’s a film where the “moment in history” is the star and not the people and it’s a credit to the filmmakers and actors involved as they get that across with genuine skill and aplomb.

When it comes down to it, Fatima is a story of faith and what really makes it effective is that it isn’t heavy handed or preachy, in fact it’s kind of the cinematic embodiment of what religion is supposed to be.  Not a story about how person X and person Y, but as an example of how we should live our lives.  This was the story of how a moment of faith and hope affected so many different people’s lives and no matter what you believe that’s actually a really beautiful thing.