The mythology of Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) has reached such an entrenchment within the West that the identify is synonymous, globally, with exploration. But for director Lav Diaz, and for a lot of raised within the Philippines and within the International South extra typically, Magellan’s historical past is marred with the bloody stains of colonialism. In Magellan, Diaz counters the notion of the titular hero as a Nice Man with a special mythology: the legend of Lapulapu, the chieftain of Mactan Island, who repelled the Portuguese explorer and his Spanish forces to their deaths.
Lapulapu’s fabled heroics are the stuff of legend within the Philippines, the place his likeness has been reproduced in work, movies, and in a 66-foot-tall monument in Cibu. But Diaz paints the determine as a mythological trick, an imaginary piece of bait that Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), a chief on Mactan Island, drew up to be able to lure the bombastic Magellan to battle.
For Diaz, the selection is borne out of a doubt of Lapulapu’s real-life existence, as he talked about in a post-screening Q&A at AFI Fest, however for the movie itself, the creation creates one thing new. An implicit argument that tales of Western hegemony may be overwhelmed again by different tales, tales of resistance, tales of braveness. And that the Achilles’ heel of a colonial conqueror could also be its hubris.
Magellan Is Diaz’s Most Subversive Work But
Clocking in at 160 minutes, Magellan is certainly one of Gradual Cinema pioneer Lav Diaz’s shortest movies. That size supplies the maybe inaccurate notion that the movie is certainly one of his extra accessible. But the movie, shot on a Panasonic J7 digital camera with a sq. 4:3 facet ratio, steadily looks like a museum set up in its desire for picture over plot. The digital camera and its framing present Magellan with a persistently ethereal glow, each of cinema’s origins as a continuation of the nonetheless picture and of a extra fashionable ilk. Shot by frequent Albert Serra collaborator Artur Tort, every body is painstakingly composed. Just like the Dutch panorama work of the time, every body bursts with a unprecedented degree of element.
The compounded impact of this selection supplies Diaz a secondary weapon in his anti-colonialist scourge: the immutability of nature. Just like the experimental filmmaker James Benning, Diaz’s frames are fastened on a tripod like an off-the-cuff observer, watching as worlds are created, destroyed, and rebuilt. Happening primarily between 1511, when Magellan conquered the Spanish metropolis of Malacca, and his beheading in 1521 by the hands of Humabon, Magellan paperwork the anti-hero’s bloody, chilly path, which is commonly solid by a cussed unwillingness to stick to the ecological guidelines that govern everybody else.
But, his depiction of Lapulapu as imaginary included, Diaz is generally unconcerned with the information of historical past a lot as its enduring place in his individuals’s collective consciousness. The crew has taken nice care to painting period-accurate clothes, props, and settings (with the ship Victoria absolutely re-constructed), however useless our bodies and battles dot many a body with out a lot clarification or exposition. There’s a frankness on show which posits that histories are instructed in broad strokes: take a look at this man, take a look at the blood-soaked earth he left behind.
Regardless of that path of blood, Magellan is an exceptionally stunning movie to have a look at, with Tort’s cinematography telling as a lot of the story of this unromantic romantic hero as Diaz’s script. Magellan is framed as a power-hungry, petulant baby whose ambition is matched solely by his capability to simply shed no matter private values he could maintain, notably as a so-called Christian. In a single notably gorgeous picture, Magellan is framed looking at a large fortress on a seashore, which cleanly tells the story of each a small man and his outsized needs. Diaz’s criticism for the indigenous can be evident by framing in a startling last picture of the tribe dancing with severed heads round a glowing fireplace.
Diaz, too, takes time to humanize Magellan, largely by his love of Beatriz (Ângela Ramos), whose presence within the movie is generally portrayed by a collection of glowing, softly filtered apparition-like hallucinations. Removed from his house and from the girl he loves, Magellan goals of her giving start, of the demise of their baby, and of her personal demise, too, all in delicately imbricated pictures.
Diaz’s earlier work is each longer, cheaper and largely in black and white. Magellan continues to be lengthy, however by comparability, a breeze; it’s also clearly costly and facilities a large international star in what is actually a biopic. However Diaz’s work is subversive by design, a bait-and-switch as a matter after all. The few historic information that Diaz consists of, like dates and areas, are mere footnotes to a bigger discourse of the enduring legacy of colonialism’s inherent vacancy.
Maybe the clearest indicator of the filmmaker’s intentions is within the character of Magellan’s Cebuano slave, whom he names Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), the buying of whom begins the movie and the petrified eyes of whom finish it. Enrique’s bloodied arms are so as a result of political violence is a requirement for his freedom, a somber actuality and reminder from Diaz for our polarized current. Some issues are inescapable.
Magellan screened on the 2025 AFI Fest.
- Launch Date
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September 10, 2025
- Runtime
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165 minutes
- Writers
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Lav Diaz
- Producers
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Joaquim Sapinho, Montse Triola, Albert Serra, Bianca Balbuena, Paul Soriano, Bradley Liew
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Gael García Bernal
Ferdinand Magellan
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