Magellan

Official Selection, 2025 Cannes Film Festival
Philippines Best International Film Submission, 2026 Academy Awards

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Ferdinand Magellan in Lav Diaz’s stark, chilling, and uncompromising revisionist history of the Portuguese explorer and his fateful end in what is now the Philippines. His may be a quest for riches, adventure, or religion, but in Diaz’s portrayal, it is also a tale of corpses. We first see a young Magellan in Malacca, less a victorious hero than a wounded snake in the jungle, barely noticing the befallen from both sides, their blood staining the Malayan Archipelago. He returns to Europe to bankroll his next voyage. He marries, but his sacrosanct kinship to family is stretched to a tension point by Magellan’s increasing itch for glory that leads him back east.

In Diaz’s telling, Magellan’s quest is less nautical exploration than the long, gradual darkening of the human soul. Diaz doesn’t spare the conquered either. Just as he is disinterested in the adventurer’s courage, he is unromantic about any savage innocent. All exist in a brutal universe of power, idolatry, desperation, and bloodthirst. As always, Diaz has in the back of his mind another Ferdinand: Marcos himself, and the chauvinistic myths of Filipino exceptionalism that can be traced to Magellan’s ultimate slaying.

Diaz exhumes this history through the visual language of European painting. Co-shot by Albert Serra cinematographer Artur Tort, the film inverts colonial landscapes and Renaissance realism, conjuring both God and Devil, transcendence and catastrophe, kings and mythic rebels.

– Brian Hu

Film Underwriting supported by Eleanor Roosevelt College and International House, UC San Diego.