Graham Greene once remarked that the biggest problem of our age lies in the fact that we have lost the ability to believe in miracles and their meaning. Marco Pontecorvo’s Fatima may go some way to addressing this problem, but perhaps not the whole hog. Based on the life of Sister Lucia, a Portuguese nun who claimed to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary in a field in Fatima, Portugal in 1917, the film documents the events that led to the Vatican deeming the apparitions “worthy of belief” in 1930. Recounted in flashbacks, Fatima pits the protagonist Lucia against two main opponents. In 1989, Lucia (Sonia Braga) agrees to a questioning of the events of her childhood by a sceptical professor (Harvey Keitel of Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction). In the 1917 scenes, Lucia (Stephanie Gil) takes a stand against her parents, the clergy and small-town mayor (Goran Visnjic formerly of ER) whose secularism is designed to go hand-in-hand with the mechanical horrors of the First World War.