The making of 'Isang Himala”

It is a story that owes its provenance to a series of alleged Marian apparitions nearly six decades ago.

- By LE BALTAR

Sometime in 1966, eight schoolgirls on their way home claimed to have caught sight of the Blessed Mother on a hill in Cabra, an island north-westernmost of Lubang, Occidental Mindoro. After the holy sighting, the principal seer, Belinda Villas, became a faith healer. People began turning to her to assuage their illnesses, an impulse that was no longer a surprise for a country mired in abject precarity at the time. The child’s healing prowess quickly became commercialized, according to Ricky Lee, who wrote a script based on the divine act a decade later, in 1976, shortly after spending life behind bars due to trumped-up charges.

Lee peddled the material to several producers but was met with rejections, for it was said to be too serious and depressing. This, until the early 1980s when the eminent screenwriter learned about a script contest under the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, which was among the projects of the so-called conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Titled Himala, the material won and drew the attention of director Ishmael Bernal. Nora Aunor, then at the peak of her career, took on the iconic role of Elsa, whose visions would amass idle worship from the people of Cupang, a town enmeshed in sand and heat, populated by dread and desolation, and bound by desire or the lack thereof. The film premiered at the 1982 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), sweeping the festival awards, grossed around P30 million, and competed for the Golden Bear at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival, the first for a Filipino title.

Himala was a sweeping collaboration between three giants, all conferred as among the country’s national artists for film, in what is arguably the second golden age of Philippine cinema, however young this cinema might be, against the backdrop of Marcosian rule and American imperialism, retold and touted as part of every local cinematic canon possible.