Magellan (Magalhães)

 

Director Lav Diaz

director on the set

director with Sanny Joaquin and cinematographer Artur Tort

Diaz with assistant director Sanny Joaquin

Diaz with cast at Cannes

Gael García Bernal and Lav Diaz

Ferdinand Magellan at Naval Museum in Madrid

MAGELLAN (Magalhães)                 B                                                                         Philippines  Spain  Portugal  France  Taiwan  (163 mi)  2025  d: Lav Diaz

The promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.                                                                   —Indigenous natives first reaction to seeing a white man

Lav Diaz is a pioneering Filipino auteur who re-examines history through his films which challenge conventional narratives, known for his long films and contemplative style, making films of moral complexity, often delving into the themes of history, suffering, and the human condition, whose earlier four-hour film Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2014) was an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Writing and directing his own films, also sharing the cinematography and editing duties, while responsible for his own production design, most of his films are over five-hours in length, some of them pushing the nine and ten-hour mark, where six of his films are in the top 20 of the longest films of all time (List of longest films), offering an extensive exploration of the Filipino socio-political landscape through cinema, with Diaz indicating he is planning a nine-hour extended version of this film focusing more on the wife from about fifteen hours of footage shot but not used, releasing this more accessible shorter version under three hours for film festivals.  By retelling the tale of 16th century Age of Discovery explorer Ferdinand Magellan from a minimalist and modernist perspective, where he’s no swashbuckling hero of the seas, instead Diaz portrays him as radically antiheroic, depicting his voyage as a brutal, revisionist critique of colonialism, mythmaking, and religious zealotry driven by obsession, rejecting the typical “Great Man of History” narrative, conveying a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.  A meditation on the excesses of ambition and avarice, where we are forced to witness what colonialism looks like, with splashes of Native nudity, it’s a bit like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), with men developing a God-complex, versed in their own moral superiority, viewing themselves above the teeming throngs, continually downplaying the needs and interests of the Indigenous tribes who are simply not like them, and therefore don’t matter as much.  It’s a somber case study of colonialist expansion, where the rest of the world is seen only by how it can benefit the country of origin that financed the expedition, in this case Spain, as Portugal, the country of Magellan’s birth, turned down his original request, as Portugal already had a highly profitable eastern seaward trade route to the Spice Islands via Africa, making a costly, highly speculative new western route unnecessary.  

Working in color for the first time in a decade, making his first film not in the Tagalog language, primarily using Spanish and Portuguese, with the director sharing cinematography and editing duties with Artur Tort, the regular cameraman for Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, who is a producer on this film, screening in the Cannes Premiere section, yet in some ways it resembles Lisandro Alonso’s period film Jauja (2014) or Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) in its historical reach, while also treading on the same expansive territory as Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).  The difference is there’s absolutely no interiority of Magellan, or anyone else for that matter, though this is more restrained and nuanced from his other films, as Magellan’s quest turns into an obsession with power, leading to men questioning his leadership, where there’s a lot of inflicted cruelty both towards his own men, some of whom openly mutiny and are left behind in some God forsaken place in Argentina’s Patagonia, yet also towards the natives he meets in this “new world” of the Philippines.  Despite his meticulous planning, Magellan is unprepared for the difficulties he encounters attempting to pass the Strait of Magellan in the southernmost tip of South America, taking over a month, much longer than expected, with one mutinied ship returning to Spain, while another was lost at sea on an exploring expedition, yet even afterwards, setting sail into the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he is shocked that it takes months, not days, without encountering food, leaving many men dying of malnourishment or sick with scurvy en route, where his fleet of five ships is whittled down to just a single ship.  Like most Europeans at the time, however, Magellan thought Asia was much closer to South America than it actually is.  Far from the courageous explorer depicted in the history books, according to Diaz, who spoke at the Cannes screening, “Magellan is no hero—he is a man facing his own oblivion.”  There’s a lot of screaming to the high heavens, and praying to the spirits for divine intervene, yet also an autocratic ruthlessness rarely seen in depictions of epic explorations, where brutal punishment and death go hand in hand with hunger and starvation.  Yet most of all, it’s a depiction of supreme arrogance that leads to a massive sea of deaths, which mirrors the rampant corruption and presumptive superiority of the current Trump administration, but also authoritarian Filipino leaders Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial for war crimes), belittling others and downplaying the influence of anyone who does not comply with their directives or disagrees with their actions of enriching themselves, reviving the imperialist spirit of colonialism in the modern era.

The story is told in three sections, with the dates imprinted on the lower left side of the screen, the first is set in Malacca, Malaysia in 1511, commonly known as the Spice Islands, where Magellan (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the first international star Diaz has ever worked with), under someone else’s command, Afonso de Albuquerque (Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Alan Koza), participates in the capture of Malacca, leaving him wounded and injured in the leg, eventually limping from the onset of gangrene, yet they are victorious, with bloodied bodies seen strewn across the landscape, acquiring a Malay slave named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who is initially seen caged but becomes his own personal interpreter.  Little more than a footnote in history, Enrique is often omitted entirely, but in some ways he is the true protagonist of the film, patiently getting his revenge in obtaining his freedom, a near silent observer who has the last and final words of the film.  The second follows his recovery in Portugal where he has a controversial falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration and grew furious when he aligned himself with King Charles V of Spain, taking an oath of allegiance, which was paramount to treason in Portugal, as the two countries were arch rivals who were not only competing for dominance in the spice industry, but also for influence in colonies around the world.  It’s here that he takes a wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who grows pregnant before his departure in 1519, and is seen as an angelic counterpart to his ruthless ambition, Magellan new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 (1/3) YouTube (1:45), surrealistically appearing in his dreams during the long voyage.  The proposed longer version supposedly revolves around Beatriz, where virtually nothing is known about her.  Once he sets sail, his 265 men all-Portuguese crew is mostly comprised of criminals, because many experienced sailors refused to support Magellan, unraveling in a long, slow section where time appears to stop, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (50 seconds), losing all that initial eager anticipation of what they may encounter, where the prolonged voyage severely weakens the crew, becoming a test of hunger and allegiance, exposing questions of loyalty, where Magellan’s behavior is markedly different than when they began, as he started treating his officers in a cruel way, growing very angry and indignant that some of them mutinied, forcing one to behead the other, subjecting men to lashes while executing crew members who engaged in homosexuality, according to a journal kept by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian navigator whom Magellan hired to keep detailed documents of the voyage.  Diaz apparently spent seven years researching Magellan, aided by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo, using a replicated reconstruction of the actual ship Victoria, historically accurate costumes, with no battle scenes, only the devastating aftermath is shown, and no actual violence other than what he forces his own sailors to endure on the ship, ultimately shifting the focus from the European perspective to that of the Indigenous tribes, becoming a revisionist work that goes against the grain of conventional historical accounts, much of which is little more than victorious mythmaking.

The third section shows Magellan arriving in the Philippines in 1521, a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce, comprised of more than 7000 islands, though fewer than 2000 are inhabited, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (1:32), which they thought to be the Spice Islands, but they didn’t find any spices, discovering instead a developed society, one not at all isolated from the outside world, possessing a written language, and already having some knowledge of Europeans through traders.  They are met by local leader Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), with Magellan offering sweet jam to his sick son, who may have been suffering from scurvy, while also presenting him with a statuette of Santo Niño to watch over him.  When the boy recovers, many attribute his miraculous recovery to God, quickly converting the island to Catholicism and baptizing the inhabitants, but in their zealous rush for complete domination, they destroy all remnants of the local anitos, viewing them as sacrilegious idolatry figures, an act that emboldens resistance, as their island way of life is being destroyed.  With obsessive delusions of grandeur and undisputed power, most of the tribes capitulate, but there are holdouts, with Humabon leading Magellan into the wrath of one of his foes, another chief named Lapu-Lapu who refuses to convert, instead mobilizing his forces against the foreign leader, with Magellan profoundly underestimating the strength of the natives, believing superior European weaponry would scare off the “barbarian” forces, but due to shallow waters, his ships remained at too great a distance to inflict harm, so he takes a small landing party of only about 60 half-armed men, burning the grass homes, which only helps mobilize the resistance, where the overwhelming counterattack by 2000 natives wipes out the European forces in what amounts to a massacre, killing Magellan on the spot, like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, leaving no survivors, turning tragically dark and morbid, a fate surprisingly narrated by Enrique, conveyed through an ultra-realistic approach to colonial violence.  The dead bodies on the beach paint a dire picture of human slaughter, with the remaining 18 men on the ship, one of whom is Enrique, quickly making a hasty exit and returning to Spain, becoming the only ship to completely circumnavigate the globe.  In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is a celebrated national hero for having withstood the initial European invasion, remaining a mythic cultural figure that remains embedded in the national consciousness, even warranting a national holiday, but Diaz subverts this image with provocative suggestions that Humabon, in an attempt to overcome his rival, may have invented Lapu-Lapu, who is never seen, and may not have ever existed in human form, cleverly planted in the mind’s eye as a myth to deceive Magellan and his men, which then leads to their downfall in an ambush, using the power of mythmaking as a political weapon.  Questioning whose version of history gets remembered, Diaz suggests history is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.   

Blind Chance (Przypadek)

 

Director Krzysztof Kieślowski (center)

BLIND CHANCE (Przypadek)           A                                                                                     aka: The Accident                                                                                                                Poland  (122 mi)  1981  d: Krzysztof Kieślowski

I don’t really know why there wasn’t any true description of Poland in the 1970’s in the other arts.  There wasn’t even a proper description of it in literature, and literature is easier to produce than film.  It’s not subject to censorship to the same degree although individual writers or individual books might be.  Yet films offered the best description of Poland.  At the end of 1970’s I realized that this description was limited, that we had reached these limits and that there was no point in describing this world any further.  A result is ‘Blind Chance,’ which is no longer a description of the outside world but rather of the inner world.  It’s a description of the powers which meddle with our fate, which push us one way or another.                                      —Krzysztof Kieślowski, 11 October* film & talk: Krzysztof Kieślowski – Blind Chance ...

Poland has the unfortunate distinction of having been invaded in 1939 by Nazi Germany from the West while also by Russia days later from the East, becoming the center of the Holocaust during the war, where Auschwitz will forever be linked with one of the worst atrocities in human history.  The population experienced horrific oppression by both occupying forces, with the Russians eventually prevailing afterwards, yet the aftermath left a moral void that still reverberates today, though Polish artists today enjoy Western-style freedom.  Context is essential with this film, as the director was born into the Poland of WWII, where it took him three tries to gain acceptance into the Łódź Film School, while this film is a product of the political anxiety of its time, going hand-in-hand with the long-exiled Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz (the prize awarded a year prior to the making of this film) and his book entitled The Captive Mind, a study of the capitulation of artists to the demands of Stalinism, as Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the supreme artists in cinema and Polish history, where this revelatory work early in his career beautifully speaks to the malaise of a nation, introducing prevalent themes that are expanded in his later efforts, shot during the Russian communist occupation, yet remains timeless and strikingly modernist.  This film illuminates the intersection of fate, coincidence, and choice, suggesting chance rules our lives as much as choice does, examining how a single innocuous event can irrevocably alter our lives forever, offering three distinctly different outcomes in the life of a young medical student as he runs to catch a train in Łódź to Warsaw, none of which lead to a desirable result.  In one he joins the communist party, hoping to make an impact, defining himself by his commitment to the cause, yet he inadvertently harms the ones he loves the most, in another he’s arrested and sent to a labor camp where he bands together with associates he meets in an underground movement resisting the communist authority, yet is thoroughly ineffective, while in the third he returns to his life in Łódź and becomes a family man, establishing a successful medical career, yet he’s completely apolitical, refusing to take sides, nonetheless his life is deeply impacted in ways outside his control.  In each he establishes a different group of friends (with actors revolving into different roles), a different career, a different love interest, and takes on decidedly different political views, yet none bring him happiness.  Influenced by Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978), yet giving rise to Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998), Kieślowski developed innovative narrative forms and stylistic methods to address pressing existential, moral, and political issues that reflected conditions in Poland at the time, living under the repressive Stalinist machinations of communism, a kind of outdated, old-world relic that transplanted itself to Poland, leaving few options, as individual free will in a totalitarian society is simply steamrolled out of existence, easily crushed under relentless pressure to conform.  Kieślowski began his career making short black and white documentaries, yet concluded making sumptuously elegant features, committed early on to the principles of realism, where this film reflects the moral dilemma of life under communism, where there really is no choice at all, as bowing down to the pressures of authority is the only available option, yet each new generation seeks an alternative path, one that doesn’t yet exist, overwhelmed by the absurdities of existence, as totalitarianism dominates every aspect of one’s life, where being suspicious of your neighbors is an everyday reality.  Ordinary people’s lives were constantly under pressure, followed and surveilled by the police or their thugs, apartments routinely ransacked searching for seditious activity, arrested and accused of crimes you did not commit, confessing what you know about others to police in hopes of alleviating some of that strain is often the one and only option.  Although the movie was made in 1981 on the eve of martial law, whereupon it was immediately banned, it had its premiere in 1987 in a censored form, screening at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes (initially rejected as the work of a “local artist”), as the delay was caused by state-imposed censorship due to the film’s political content.  A recent restoration has returned the film to its original form, with one brief censored section of a police assault missing altogether, yet the sound remains.  The collapse of communism in 1989 was a major turning point, as films prior to that were all motivated by the strain of life under communism.  While other Polish filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi struggled to find funding and relevant subject material after 1989, Kieślowski’s career, long undervalued outside Poland, flourished, suddenly regarded as the vanguard of Eastern European art cinema, a worthy heir to Tarkovsky, discovering transnational cultural productions, where the worldwide acclaim for his film The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988) led to international coproductions, with his last four films made largely outside of Poland, and predominantly in French, while broadening the ethical and metaphysical questions of his earlier films.   

During the communist period, Polish cinema served as an antidote to the propaganda of state television, never more strongly than the cinema of moral anxiety of the late 70’s, also known as cinema of moral unrest, a grouping of blunt yet stylistically unembellished films that brought attention to the social ills of the nation, where people find themselves isolated and alone in a corrupt and dishonest society, yet the period was short-lived due to the imposition of martial law in 1981.  Andrzej Wajda paid homage to Kieślowski, claiming “When we were lost and confused during martial law, he alone knew which path to follow.”  His methods, a pronounced existential strain both stylistically and narratively, exposing the uncertainties of life and the impossibility of judging the lives of others, had a profound influence on other European directors, perhaps none more than the austere work of Austrian director Michael Haneke, emotionally spare, fractured in perspective, using long takes to accentuate a heightened realism.  After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the formation of the European Union, Haneke’s films explored the increasing isolation of the individual in a fragmented Europe, with Kieślowski’s THREE COLORS TRILOGY (1993-94) sharing similar themes with Haneke’s Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000), both sharing the same French actress Juliette Binoche, with both offering an insightful, modernist perspective of Europe from an informed Central European identity.  Like his earlier works, this film has a documentary quality, yet its realization of a cyclical Sisyphus syndrome where the central protagonist is doomed to repeated mistakes succinctly sums up the Cinema of Moral Anxiety era, with its irrationality of existence, where the search for hope and meaning is absurdly thwarted by a morally bankrupt and dehumanizing system, where one lives and dies meaninglessly, no matter the circumstances.  Kieślowski places great faith in chance encounters, reminding us of the significance this plays in our lives, in the determination of our character, even in who we meet, and how we meet them, considering all the possible “what if?” variables that might have gone another way, yet each life is a mysterious intersection with the hands of fate, where this film is a reminder that had things gone differently at some point we could be living entirely different lives.  A disjointed series of seemingly unrelated incidents start the film in a shockingly well-made opening montage, providing something of an abstract historical backstory connecting the memory of the past to the present, including traumatic childhood incidents (some remembered inaccurately) and a primal scream evoking a terrifying sense of helplessness and despair, though their interconnectedness is not actually realized until the final shot.  Given a grim, social realist look by cinematographer Krzysztof Pakulski, his camera is cleverly utilized, more active than previous works, displaying a sensual sensibility, mixing eroticism with a warm humanism, but through it all Witek (Bogusław Linda) remains optimistic in leading a good life, an apparent reference to Voltaire’s Candide, whose sole existence is guided by living the best of all possible worlds.  In each of three narratives, he tries to make the best ethical choices, seeking to live meaningfully, where if he cannot change the world, he can at least do his best not to let the world change him, which under a totalitarian regime would be a remarkable achievement, yet the intrusion of reality as an unstoppable force intervenes each time defying his efforts, leaving him disillusioned and heartbroken, casting the entire film under a darkened shadow of negativity.  Each segment opens with renewed possibilities full of hopes and promise, where it looks like Witek is in a position to choose his own destiny, as if the future is in his hands, yet he gradually gets caught up in a chain of events, accidents, and misfortunes that leave him exhausted, disappointed, and morally depleted.  There is a pronounced element of fatalism, one of the most toxic side-effects of living in a totalitarian system, as it dangerously pollutes the subconscious, perhaps best represented by a scene on the train where Witek follows a prisoner to the restroom, offering him a chance to escape, but the prisoner instead capitulates and willingly returns back to the authorities.  Throughout the film, however, this apparent disillusion with humanity is met with an equally mystifying faith in it, a remarkable characteristic from this director. 

While Poland is a devoutly Catholic country, Kieślowski was an agnostic, yet according to fellow Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who knew him well, “Krzysztof is somebody who had an incredibly deep need to believe in something transcendental.  He did believe, but at the same time he wasn’t really a member of any church, and his relationships toward the religious were less theological than ethical and metaphysical.”  Kieślowski reveals in the 1993 book Kieślowski On Kieślowski, a conversation with Danusia Stok, “given the limitation of our knowledge and the imperfection of our intelligence, there’s no way we can gauge the reality or the gravity of sin, the extent of guilt.”  What this suggests is that the only way we can escape the Sisyphean futility of utter human despair is to accept, at least hypothetically, the existence of a metaphysical point of view where things make more sense, as otherwise we will never be able to get out of the suffocating framework of “chance.”  Interestingly, one of the predominant themes of the film is stated early on from Werner (Tadeusz Łomnicki, a former member of the Party’s Central Committee), an old communist Witek meets on the train, who articulates this notion of the exhaustion of hope:

Every generation has need of light.  It needs to know, or to believe that the world can be a better place.  This need…is like a drug.  Early in life, it brings joy, as light seems near, within reach.  At life’s end, it brings bitterness, as the light has grown distant.  During those 40 years, I lived through many things, and today I see it more distant than before. […] But…life without this hope, without this bitterness, wouldn’t be worth living.

It’s curious that at the time this film was finally released in Poland in 1987, along with several other previously banned films, Polish film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski described it as “a souvenir of the past,” viewing it as a “pessimistic philosophical parable on human destiny shaped by occurrences beyond individual control,” relatable, supposedly, only to those still behind the Iron Curtain.  Yet the film is not some outdated nihilistic relic, actually transcending any notion of time and national boundaries precisely because it could come to represent any point of living under oppression, where according to Dennis Lim’s Criterion essay, Blind Chance: The Conditional Mood, “the failures of the system remain secondary to the human-scale dilemmas of the individuals trapped within it.”  Witek in all three segments is basically the same person, a kind of everyman who is morally upright, honest, and virtuous, trying to make the best of his life, where he’s a decent human being irrespective of his politics or life choices.  What’s quite astonishing, particularly in comparison with Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt), is that moral intent matters, and that ethical choices make a profound difference whether advocated by the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky or the Romantic Polish tradition of glorifying national martyrs, who are revered for believing in causes greater than themselves.  It is inevitable that all choices lead to death, where fate and death are interlinked, yet Kieślowski’s next film NO END (1985) is intrinsically a meditation on death and its haunting presence that continues to linger in our lives.  Yet what distinguishes this film is how essential ethical choice becomes in the human experience, elevating not only this film but the overall stature of Kieślowski as a filmmaker, as his films always feature philosophical journeys into the human spirit while demonstrating a concern for the moral and ethical implications of human action.  Accordingly, he confirmed his status as a major contemporary director with The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988), an ambitious series of ten hour-long films funded by Polish television, telling stories loosely based on the Ten Commandments, yet set in the heart of the modern existentialist world.  This ambiguous criss-cross narrative surpasses, to a large extent, the formulaic restrictions of the cinema of moral unrest by introducing larger-than-life themes into the equation, becoming a philosophical quest for knowledge, an internal odyssey of changing configurations, where Witek’s life revolves around three women, Czuszka (Bogusława Pawelec), his first love, Werka (Marzena Trybała), the sister of a childhood friend, and finally Olga (Monika Gozdzik), a fellow medical student that he marries.  Yet in such an over-controlled authoritative society, making no choice at all is synonymous with the status quo, as it offers no resistance to the continued offenses of the state, where Witek’s success is achieved at the expense of others, with the director highlighting the randomness of choice in an amusing scene showing a Slinky on the stairs, coming to life as it gracefully slithers effortlessly downward step-by-step until it comes to a stop at the bottom where it “looks dead.”  A point of emphasis should be made regarding an isolated scene where two jugglers appear in an open courtyard, with Witek watching them in awe, as their skill in generating a neverending back-and-forth stream of balls in the air is simply unfathomable.  The significance of this scene may easily be overlooked, as it’s not really part of the overall narrative, but appears to stand on its own in the third segment, yet it has major ramifications.  Witek is told “They’ve been practicing for at least ten years…Seems no one in the world can juggle like that.”  What they represent is a vision of excellence bordering on perfection, an example of what people can achieve if they truly dedicate themselves, representing a supreme form of inner freedom.  Regardless of the political stratum, these two are unaffected, seemingly capable of juggling like that forever, as they are masters of their craft, where nothing breaks their concentration.  This may be a moment of enlightenment for Witek, perhaps envisioning himself as the best doctor he can become in his profession, where the pursuit of excellence is its own just reward.  In the second segment, Witek makes a religious transformation and asks to be baptized, yet still questions the existence of God.  This is arguably the most intensely religious sequence in the entire Kieślowski repertoire, as he breaks out into prayer afterwards, but asks only for God to “be there.”  While God may not have shown up yet in his life, this prayer sequence insures that there’s a place waiting for him in the future and he’s warning God to prepare for being present in that moment.  Even if only an abstract metaphysical notion, even if non-existent, God still plays a central role in our lives.  It’s an extraordinary inner awareness that emerges into the heart of the film, which is an inner dialogue we have with ourselves and those higher powers of our own choosing.  It serves as the Bressonian moment of transcendence, a cinematic connection to Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), one of the most unique of religious expressions.  While not as polished and as ravishingly beautiful as his later works, this gritty effort is remarkably complex and powerful, showing rare insight into a moment in history while setting the tone for the films that would follow, providing the emotional and dramatic genesis of his career.