To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple. With the Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaker’s relationship differs in frequency and seeming stature. Norte, the End of History (2013) and The Halt (2019) premiered in the Un Certain Regard and Director’s Fortnight sections, respectively, and six years on, the filmmaker’s latest, Magellan, receives its global debut in the Premiere section of the 2025 edition’s events. Regardless of what is made of this, be it another potential slight upon Diaz or sparing of more commercially viable competition directors, what is clear over the course of Magellan’s comparatively brief sub-3-hour runtime is that the defining contemporary artist of longform cinema has gifted the world yet another masterpiece.
If Diaz’s relationship with Cannes differs from that of other European festivals, much the same could be said of Magellan within the overall scheme of the director’s filmography. National history and its ramifications have defined Diaz’s career and generated a domestic model with limited international financing; and, in many ways, it is fitting that a film depicting the final years of the life of Portugal-Spain and the world’s near-first circumnavigator, who died on the shores of the Philippines, would bring with it a crosspollination of skills and voices in an exciting collaboration between the three nations (and France).
Familiarity with or a scan of a Wikipedia article on the life and conclusive expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, or Fernão de Magalhães (Gael García Bernal), fails to meaningfully represent the story at work here. As biography, the film picks up events with the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, Malaysia, before Magellan returns home to Portugal to recover from injury with the aid of his nurse and then wife Beatriz (Ângela Ramos) — this scenario providing a genuinely hilarious dramatic elision centering around an erection — and subsequently becoming a subject of Spain and beginning the Maluku Islands, Indonesia expedition that claims his life — though not there, but instead on the isles surrounding Cebu, Philippines.
Such a summary is deceptively simple, as what Diaz crafts within the work is an observational style and historical attention to the apocalyptic nature of conquest. The ravages of colonialism and imperialism have long been a preoccupation of the director in his ongoing study of the present situation of the Philippines, and it is here that one senses he is taking stock of its source. In his Qumra Masterclass at this year’s Doha Film Festival, Diaz remarked that he did six years of research for Magellan, and the fruits of this effort are felt in paying attention to the volatile terms of religious fervor that salted the Earth as Christianity took to the seas and the peoples of South East Asia wrestled with a new and greater Armageddon that entirely superseded prior Chinese and Arab interactions.
Central to the picture is the role of the displaced and uprooted Malayan, Enrique, who Magellan buys as a slave, and who accompanies and translates for the latter across the journey. In this figure can be detected a director surrogate, an ancestor doomed to witness the madness that originated global civilization and conclude the film with a dream of freedom that echoes to this day in Diaz’s works. Indeed, the decision to cast Magellan’s killer, Lapulapu, as a mythological invention marshalled by the Duterte-Marcos regimes as a national hero, brings to the fore the contemporaneity of director-theorist’s critique and call for the downtrodden to rid themselves of the specters of power and religion — there are centuries of world-circling oppression to be disabused.
Yet, if this is what the director informs his first out-and-out international work with, it would be an oversight not to mention what Artur Tort (Liberté, Pacificition) brings as co-cinematographer and editor. The stark black-and-white frames of Diaz’s oeuvre, as shot by himself or Larry Manda, are here substituted for a Renaissance and Baroque-informed color palette photographed in academy ratio. Stated simply, never has a Diaz film looked as beautiful, descrying in the shooting style a window in and through time to the European’s psychological space, while at the same time — in shooting on Portuguese shores — paying homage to Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simões, and Manoel de Oliveira.
It would be premature to rush to superlatives for the year, never mind the decade, but regarding Magellan as among Cannes’ best offerings this year would be in no way inappropriate, and makes its late-night, out-of-competition screening at the very least a glaring mistake. Nevertheless, Diaz’s Qumra discussion brings word of a nine-hour version, Beatriz, The Wife, and with it the possibility of dwelling all the longer in the frames by which Diaz has rendered the colonial past present and alive for criticism.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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