I CAUGHT my first glimpse of Cory Aquino through the viewfinder of an Arriflex 16-mm camera, and later on the flickering screen of a Steenbeck editing table.

It was November 27, Ninoy Aquino?s birth anniversary the year after his murder, and a massive rally was held at the Rizal Park. I was with a group of aspiring filmmakers, and our workshop assignment was to make a documentary film on an aspect of Philippine social reality. It being 1984, it was inevitable that Cory Aquino would figure in it somehow.

I vaguely remember confetti, priests and bishops singing ?Happy Birthday,? and finally Cory taking the stage.

She still wore black in those days, a tiny unassuming figure dwarfed by the massive swell of humanity. In her perm and glasses, she looked just like one of your church-going, mahjong-playing aunties and in time, people would start calling her Tita Cory.

I don?t remember what she said in her speech, but her voice was eerily reminiscent of my old grade school principal?s ? a schoolmarm?s voice. I was too preoccupied with light readings and figuring out which lens aperture to use to listen to the words.

But it didn?t really matter. In those days her mere presence was enough, a focus for the surging energy and emotion of the crowd.

I thought of Mahatma Gandhi?s philosophy of satyagraha. It was often translated as ?passive resistance,? but the term more accurately means ?truth force? ? in the sense of ?may the force be with you? and ?the truth will set you free.? There was a real power in the moment. You could feel it, even on film, surging through the crowd, and I finally understood why people had pinned all their hopes on her.

Filipinos are mama?s boys. That?s why we speak of Inang Bayan instead of a Fatherland, and why it was Cory Aquino instead of her husband Ninoy who finally led the people in overthrowing the Marcos dictatorship.

We eventually decided to call our little workshop film ?A Spark of Courage,? and although Cory Aquino wasn?t the only widow in the film (the regime made many widows), hers was the spark that would eventually start a forest fire.

Conventional wisdom ? which is to say, classic Marxist analysis, which still held a lot of water in those days ? held that the daughter of a hacendero could never really understand, let alone represent, the interests and aspirations of the laboring masses. For all of Ninoy?s progressive ideas and his reported epiphany while in detention, he still represented the old political elite. In fact, he had more in common with his arch-nemesis Ferdinand Marcos than either of them would probably care to admit.

Conventional wisdom also held that free elections could never be held under a dictatorship, which was why a boycott was the only principled response to the February 1986 snap elections.

(Besides, how could anyone take seriously a political movement whose marching song was sung by Tony Orlando and Dawn ? the same people responsible for ?Candida? and ?Knock Three Times??)

Conventional wisdom failed to take into account the power of national myth and archetypes. February 1986 represented a real leap of faith for the Filipino people, a leap only made possible by the truth-force embodied by Cory Aquino. ?