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.   

Yeelen (Brightness)

 

Director Souleymane Cissé

YEELEN (Brightness)                        A                                                                                          aka:  The Light                                                                                                                                 Mali  Burkina Faso  France  Germany  (105 mi)  1987  d: Souleymane Cissé

One night I was watching late-night films on . . . I think it was on Showtime.  There was this film called Yeelen [1987].  The picture had just started at 2:30 in the morning, and the image was very captivating, and I watched the whole thing.  I discovered that it was directed by Souleymane Cissé and came from Mali.  I got so excited.  I had seen Ousmane Sembène’s films from Senegal—he was the first to put African cinema on the map, in the ‘60’s—but I hadn’t seen anything quite like this . . . the poetry of the film.  I’ve seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.  This was one of them.           

—Spike Lee interviews Martin Scorsese, November 24, 2008, Martin Scorsese - Interview Magazine 

The rich imagery and symbolism are carefully depicted to achieve a specific goal and significance, which is to invite the spectator to seek for the deeper meaning which transcends the literary meaning of what the entire film signifies.  

—Souleymane Cissé

Winner of the Festival Jury Prize at Cannes in 1987, the first African film to win any prize at Cannes, a festival known for its paucity of African films, and one of the first African films ever distributed on video, this is a mythic story set in an unspecified, pre-colonial past, firmly rooted in West African Mande culture (Mandé peoples), which is nothing less than the story of the world’s creation, set in an ancient Malian kingdom of West Africa, as told through an elaborately visualized African mythology and lore as seen through the eyes of a young Bambara (Bambara people) native, Nianankoro (Issiaka Kané), son of one of the elders, who upon reaching manhood discovers his life’s destiny, that he must confront his own father who has relentlessly been tracking him down since birth vowing to kill him.  His father Soma (Niamanto Sanógó) is an evil sorcerer who can summon magic powers and walks the earth chanting to the gods with a magic post carried by two servants.  Although Nianankoro recognizes his future is fraught with danger, he follows his mother’s instructions wearing a neck fetish for protection before setting out on a spiritual journey where he not only intends to escape from his father but also hopes to find his blind uncle, his father’s twin Djigui Diarra (also played by Sanógó), who will offer him more protection.  Shifting the social realist style of his earlier films, consulting with Malian historian Youssouf Tata Cissé, a specialist in the oral history of Mali, the filmmaker has reconfigured his own African cinema language, continuing the legacy of Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène and Burkina Faso filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo, combining the music of Malian vocalist Salif Kefta with French jazz artist Michel Portal, opening with a brief prologue referencing Bambara symbols and divine knowledge essential to the Komo, a powerful secret society of sorcerers, “Heat makes fire and the two worlds, earth and sky, exist through light.”  In a sign of respect, permission of community elders was asked by Cissé before reenacting scenes of Komo incantations.  The film follows Nianankoro’s mythical adventures and is essentially an examination of the process of creation and destruction through light (Yeelen), expressed through oral African traditions, oftentimes featuring tribal ceremony, as Nianankoro crosses through various tribal regions.  Described by Film Comment magazine as “not only the most beautifully photographed African film ever, but also the best African film ever made,” where it was specifically designed to highlight African as opposed to Western influences, yet it surprisingly contains Western influences as well, including an Eden-like quality to the landscape, surrealistic mysticism, and an adherence to an Oedipus complex that the director may have subconsciously not even been aware of.  While this film was clearly aimed at African viewers, accentuating a culture rarely depicted on celluloid, it’s nonetheless unsurprising that those who are completely unfamiliar with the cultural references have also been mesmerized by the artistic aesthetic, as it speaks to both African and Western cultures, a film of hypnotic beauty and spiritual depth, playing out as an allegory of the times, where the ambiguous mythic narrative and arresting visual style transcend borders, lending it a universal appeal.  Part of the 1960’s decolonization and national liberation struggles on the continent, which were jolted by the assassination of democratically elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, African directors such as Cissé (who died earlier this year in February), Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror, and Abderrahmane Sissako were all educated in Moscow film schools, a practice that has discontinued, where there was initially some question about who might follow in their footsteps, but their collective influence clearly extends to a new crop of filmmakers like Mahamat-Saleh Haroun from Chad and Mati Diop of Senegal, both of whom studied film in Paris.

Taking three years to film, with a series of setbacks that included dust storms that lasted for months, making the crew sick, along with the unexpected death of the lead actor Issiaka Kané who tragically died during the production of the film, it was further delayed due to overseas shipping of equipment and film stock from France, where the French financing actually led to the arrest and imprisonment of Cissé, as it was legally forbidden in local productions, while shooting under such strong sunlight in a location not far from the equator presented its own challenges.  Set in a timeless age, spoken in Bambara and Fula, a historical fiction loosely based on the Epic of Sundiata, the Bambara even today remain the most powerful ethnic group in Mali, a country that prides itself in the inclusion of minority groups, each of which maintains their own distinctive ethnic culture.  While the Bambara culture features ancestor worship, the film is steeped in the traditions of the Komo, a ritualistic blending of science and nature, mastered by the descendants of powerful magicians, some of whom, like Somo and his younger brother Bafing, have abused their control of the supernatural, becoming corrupt with tyrannical power (a metaphor for the current rulers of Mali), refusing to share their wisdom outside their small enclosed ranks, or use their power for the wider benefit of all, which is the ideal sought by Nianankoro who has inherited his father’s gifts.  Forcing viewers to navigate the fundamental oppositions of change and tradition, life and death, light and darkness, Cissé indicts the corrupt and violent regime of President Moussa Traoré, who was in power when the film was made, a military dictatorship that killed protestors as well as political opposition, coming to power through a military coup that ousted the first president of an independent Mali, Modibo Keïta.  Simply put, this is the story of good and evil, imagining what happens when the two forces finally encounter one another, a film that thrives on the subjective point of view, as the director reveals the central conflict from various perspectives.  Much of it told through the amateurish performances of non-professional actors in an excruciatingly slow, non-narrative, dreamlike quality, where the dialogue is sparse, much of it perplexing, remaining a mystery, where Nianankoro, despite his magical gifts, is an everyman that the audience can sympathize with as he’s the only character that’s fully realized, earnest and kind-hearted, a young man who means well, where people willingly bestow upon him their wisdom in ordinary, everyday conversation.  Many of the rituals displayed are impressive, even if not fully understood, as the filmmaker is adhering to the authenticity of the Malian people.  Abandoned and repudiated by his father at birth and raised by his mother, Somo continues to spew venom about his desire to kill his own flesh and blood, beautifully expressed in a secret Komo ceremony where he convinces the others within the circle, “My son is the knife blade, but I am the handle.  Not even the sharpest knife can cut its own handle,” where his mantra seems to be, “You have to know how to betray in order to succeed,” featuring another weird moment where he magically forces a dog and an albino man about to be sacrificed to the gods to walk backwards towards him, as if being pulled against time, which only adds to the layered richness of the setting.  Nianankoro grows curious why his father hates him so much, a mystery that is addressed, but never really answered, so true meaning remains engulfed in mystery, continually hidden throughout, even to those who seek such knowledge.      

Like Homer’s Odyssey, Nianankoro sets out on his journey alone through the territories of Peul and Dogon, a bit like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), where after they separate, perhaps for the last time, his mother (Soumba Traore) performs a sacred river baptismal asking the gods for his blessing, pouring milk over her naked upper torso, a quiet but immensely moving image.  Nianankoro in bare feet walks through the arid landscape of the nomadic Peul people, a tribe featuring horses and spears, who are intent on arresting him before he casts a spell to freeze one of the Peul warriors before the eyes of their King (Balla Moussa Keïta), an impressive feat.  His sorcery leads to his use in an upcoming battle with a warring tribe, as after a ritualistic head-on-head physical confrontation between two warriors, they are overrun by a neighboring village and are heading towards the King until Nianankoro sets angry bees and fire upon them to turn them back.  Having already saved his kingdom, the King asks if he could fix the infertility of his youngest wife so she could bear him a child, which he does willingly, but can’t help himself and succumbs to her beauty, actually impregnating her himself, a mistake he regrets afterwards, making him fallible, but instead of enduring the King’s wrath, he offers the girl to him before ordering them both out of his kingdom, forcing them into the cliff-dwelling lands of the Dogon, natural stargazers who have the only natural spring for miles, who offer him the advice:  “Science is inexhaustible, miracles eternal.”  Both Nianankoro and his new Peul wife Attou (Aoua Sangare) purify themselves in the waterfall before being led to his more benevolent uncle Djigui Diarra who has the gift of prophecy and offers his wisdom, confirming that his wife is indeed pregnant and carrying his son who is “destined to be a bright star,” also offering his aid, a sacred magic fetish wing of Koré, where all along Nianankoro has been carrying a wooden paddle with a gemstone eye of the Koré given to him by his mother as a gift to his uncle.  Together, they increase his powers, leading to the ultimate showdown with his father, unleashing the full force of their sorcery, with a disembodied voice announcing a final declaration of guilt against Soma, resulting in an apocalyptic blast of light that destroys them both, but it reshapes the entire landscape into sand, as a new world is born, offering a hopeful glimpse of the future, Montage, Faces, and Landscapes in Yeelen (Brightness ... YouTube (4:54).  With this film, which attempts to correct the colonial misrepresentation of African history and culture, Cissé hopes to arouse the African conscience to cleanse the government of corruption and restore the ethical integrity of ancestral Mali by linking Africans to their authentic historical roots, becoming an abstract metaphor for Africans taking control of their own destiny.  Despite attempts by Islam to extinguish the influence of the Komo, whose origins likely precede the arrival of Islam to West Africa, it still exerts great authority in contemporary Mali.  With such a visually hypnotic film, graceful and meditative, Cissé’s most philosophically layered film, the cinematography by Jean-Noël Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau is brilliant, while the music and sound design is equally stunning, especially at the finale, where the film remains quiet and haunting as it unravels its mysteries.      

Ben Okri on Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen  BFI Sight and Sound video conversation by Gaylene Gould, BFI’s Head Of Cinemas & Events, with the poet and novelist Ben Okri on YouTube (15:54)