REVIEW: ‘Isang Himala’ is a harrowing journey to the center of Filipino trauma

There was a time when, if claims were to be believed, the Virgin Mary made apparitions in nearly every corner of the country.

I was a schoolboy when relatives urged relatives to hire jeepneys to troop to Agoo in La Union, to watch the sun dance after every time a local youth took dictations from the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to him in a glass box mounted on the trunk of a tree.

There were times the hired jeepney was to go to Lipa, Batangas, where the most generic-looking...