Magellan

Lav Diaz is the great patient chronicler of Filipino history, a filmmaker whose black-and-white epics routinely run four, six or eight hours and have won the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Golden Lion at Venice. Magellan, a co-production between Portugal's Rosa Filmes, Albert Serra's Spanish company Andergraun and partners in France, the Philippines and Taiwan, turns his gaze on the man whose arrival in 1521 opened the islands to colonisation. It premiered in the Cannes Première section in 2025 and was selected as the Philippines' Oscar submission.

For Diaz it is a departure on several fronts: shot in colour, running a comparatively brisk two and three-quarter hours, and led by an international star. Gael García Bernal plays Magellan as a figure of hard ambition and religious certainty, driving his crews across the Pacific at a terrible human cost. The film proceeds in long, static tableaux — ships becalmed, men starving, forests and shorelines observed with the stillness of painting — and gives as much weight to the enslaved interpreter Enrique and to the islanders of Cebu as to the Europeans. The effect is less a heroic voyage than an unhurried anatomy of conquest.

Reviews called it Diaz's most accessible work and one of his most pointed, and it shared the Golden Spike at Valladolid. Reversing the textbook view from the ships to the shore, it is a formidable meeting of Iberian and Filipino cinema on the history they share.