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 to 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.

It breaks with his usual method in several ways: it is shot in colour, runs a comparatively brisk two and three-quarter hours, and is led by an international star. Gael García Bernal plays Magellan as a man of hard ambition and religious certainty who drives his crews across the Pacific at a terrible human cost. Diaz works in long, static tableaux of becalmed ships, starving men, forests and shorelines held with the stillness of painting, and he gives the enslaved interpreter Enrique and the islanders of Cebu as much weight as the Europeans. What emerges is an unhurried anatomy of conquest, with very little of the heroic voyage left in it.

Reviews called it Diaz's most accessible work and one of his most pointed, and it shared the Golden Spike at Valladolid. By moving the point of view from the ships to the shore it reverses the textbook account, and it brings Iberian and Filipino cinema together on a history they share.