On Demand. Google, Optimum
Review by Frederick Von Burg, Sr.
If you can’t understand why the Messiah chose to be born in a stable, you won’t understand this movie, based on fact. Why should the Mother of the Son of God appear to three shepherd children in the remote hills of Portugal at the height of World War I (1917)? The protagonists of this movie are Lucy, the ten-year-old shepherdess, her mother and father, and Jacinta and Francisco, the young accomplices who were taken by the 1918 influenza pandemic. I call them accomplices, because the mayor of the Marxist government that put Lucy in jail for causing a public disturbance, felt the kids committed a crime.
The climax of the movie is the well-documented (in newspaper accounts) Miracle of the Sun. The director did a manly job of trying to measure up to witnesses’ descriptions, but they left out the colors of the spectrum. The mayor’s wife and the mother of Lucy do excellent portrayals of femininity’s most moving moments, the pathos of drama.
Civilization 