Legendary Filipino auteur Lav Diaz recounts a decade in the life of famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan in haunting and poetic fashion, following his colonisation of SE Asia and his tragic descent into damnation.
Stunningly mounted, politically rigorous. By the standards of Filipino formalist and running-time maximalist Lav Diaz, his latest opus qualifies as a veritable blockbuster.
Magellan 2025
Magalhães
Presented in association with
Royal Thai Embassy
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Filipino auteur Lav Diaz provides a transcendent, yet blisteringly unsentimental account of the life of Ferdinand Magellan as he engaged in colonial expansion in the 16th Century. For much of the film, Magellan himself (a reserved, beguiling Gael García Bernal) is rarely depicted in close-up. Rather, we are kept at a distance, instead bearing witness to the unimaginable destruction his historically romanticised journeys of exploration wrought on the indigenous populations of Southeast Asia.
There is no glory or dignity to Magellan’s mission which, under Diaz’ unsparing eye, harrowingly details both its colonial impact, and the corrosive impact on Magellan’s own soul. Vitally, Diaz also spotlights the perspective of Magellan’s Malaysian slave, Enrique, passed from owner to owner and stripped of all but his faith, who provides a key parallel to Magellan’s increasing brutality; and wife Beatriz, who serves as tragic denied potential for Magellan’s salvation. With enrapturing, sweeping imagery, Magellan is a profound spiritual inquiry, in which Diaz weighs and contrasts the endurance of the ‘grand adventurer’ myth against the long arm of pain that has always underscored it. — Tom Augustine