Philippine director Lav Diaz is one of the major filmmakers in the Philippines. His latest picture, Magellan (Magalhães), about the titular Portuguese explorer, clocks in at a relatively tidy two hours and 45 minutes, although he is known for some extremely long films, like his five-hour 2014 picture Norte, the End of History. His other films being shot in monochrome, Magellan is his first film in color. The film stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as Magellan. Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) was a Portuguese explorer famous for leading the first expedition to circumnavigate the Earth, proving the world is round, and discovering the strait at the tip of South America that bears his name, though he died in the Philippines before completing the voyage, with one ship returning to Spain.
His 1519-1522 expedition, sailing for Spain, opened the Strait of Magellan connecting the Atlantic and Pacific and crossed the Pacific, establishing a new route to the East and the Spice Islands. The film had its opening in Los Angeles on Thursday and Friday – with the Friday night screening at the Landmark Nuart Theatre in West L.A. and Lav Diaz present for the Q&A after. Today, Magellan screens at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on Saturday, January 10, 2026, at 6:30 PM at the Festival Theaters 6. Tickets and more information at: https://psfilmfest.org/film-festival-2026/film-finder/magellan.
The movie begins in 1511, as Magellan lands on the Malaysian territory of Malacca (now part of Malaysia). The shots of swampy territory teeming with reeds are incredible. Here, the story is partially one of man against nature. The capture of Malacca in 1511 occurred when the governor of Portuguese India Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the strategic city of Malacca in 1511. The city however was built on swampy grounds and surrounded by inhospitable tropical forest, and needed to import everything for its sustenance, such as vital rice, supplied by the Javanese.
Malacca had about 10,000 buildings but most of them were made of straw and only about 500 were made from abode. They also lacked proper fortifications. Malacca had no wall except for bamboo stockades that were erected for temporary defense. At the time, the Malacca Sultanate (which was officially Muslim) covered the entire Malay Peninsula and much of northern Sumatra.
Most of the sultan’s possessions seemed to have obeyed, to their capacity, his summons for war. Before the Portuguese arrival, the Malays lacked firearms. The Malay Annals mentioned that in 1509 they did not understand “why bullets killed”, indicating their unfamiliarity with using firearms in battle, if not in ceremony. Director Lav Diz spent 7 years researching the accounts relating to Magellan in archives in both Portugal and Spain – and his attention to detail is noteworthy. He includes an important scene of Magellan purchasing a Malay slave Enrique of Malacca who later proved valuable as a translator in his conquest of the Philippines – due to the common language types of that region of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Magellan opens with the Malaccan people scurrying about, praising their gods, and readying their spears, and it’s quickly revealed that they do so after having sighted a white man. A sudden cut reveals a young Fernando Magellan (García Bernal) voyaging through a sea of dead Malaccan bodies as he looks for governor Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Alan Koza), whose violent conquest in Malacca serves as preamble for Magellan’s own. The aged Portuguese conquistador delivers an address about suffocating the Earth, ridding the world of Islam through the conquering of Medina and Mecca, and bringing on the Second Coming of Christ all before he drops to the ground to thunderous laughter from his victorious soldiers.
Among Magellan and his men, there is little talk of ideology, few noble pronouncements about bringing Christianity or “civilization” to “heathens.” They concentrate on the task at hand. There is only conquest, and the slaughter that brings it about. Apparently, some 20,000 natives were killed by the Portuguese in the capture and building of Malacca as a Portuguese trade center. You can almost smell the death, the stinking smoke of an extinguished firepit. The cry “Viva Portugal” rings hollow. After that, Magellan is free to pontificate that “Once Islam has perished, Christianity will be eternal.” The action surrounding him, however, strongly suggests that he’s delusional. And his own practice of Christianity is dubious.
Then, another sudden cut, this time, we see a dead Albuquerque. Suddenly, we are back in Lisbon and a group of women all dressed in black are standing on the shore, hoping to hear of the fate of their husbands. Magellan has to tell each the sad truth of the death of so many of their Portuguese husbands. These half-dozen women sporting their black mourning garb stand erect, unnaturally filling in the white space of the Iberian beach as they await the return of their loved ones. They don’t huddle around each other, bound by a mutual grief, suggesting instead figures in a René Magritte painting.
This impressive scene is matched by a similar scene with the Malaccan women chanting as they carry the wrapped corpses of their dead in the sea. These strange, haunting compositions hint that Diaz is reaching for the fantastical, and, by the end, he even rewrites history. Magellan often takes the structure of a fairy tale, and fairy tales rarely honor time, often jumping decades in a single sentence and happening outside of temporality.
Through a series of time jumps, we see Magellan back in Lisbon standing in front of the Torre de Belém (a slight chronological anachronism). By mid-1513 Magellan he joined the forces sent against the Moroccan stronghold of Azamor (Azemmour). In a skirmish that August he sustained a leg wound that caused him to limp for the rest of his life.
Returning to Lisbon in November 1514, he asked King Manuel of Portugal for an increase in his pension as a reward. But unfounded reports of irregular conduct on his part had reached the king: after the siege of Azamor, Magellan was accused of having sold a portion of the war spoils back to the enemy.
There he meets the 16-year-old Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who helped nurse Magellan back to health. Finding herself pregnant by Magellan, Beatriz ends up marrying Magellan. Her beauty will haunt Magellan for the years away on long voyages to sea. by the church and the Spanish crown to undertake his circumnavigating voyage. Among the jovial tavern crowd in Lisbon, Magellan always seems to have a stoic face.
He gets into a philosophical argument with a well-known Portuguese poet named Mendoza about the enslavement of indigenous peoples and Portuguese greed in their conquest and colonization actions – a key hint about filmmaker Lav Diaz’s own views about the Portuguese and Spanish imperialistic ventures in many parts of the world.
From his friend Serrão who had actually reached the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Magellan had information about the existence of the western ocean – the Pacific – and the possibility of travel across that immense body of water without encountering the Spanish. Magellan presented plans for a voyage around South America to King Manuel in 1514 and again in 1516, but the King refused Magellan’s requests. Like Columbus before him, Magellan approached King Carlos of Spain. Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca (1451–1524) was the Spanish archbishop who controlled the Casa de Contratación, an agency which managed expeditions to the New World on behalf of the Spanish crown. Fonseca arrange a meeting with the Fuggers, a powerful German banking family who were major financiers in 16th-century Europe, lending vast sums to royalty like Charles V and funding funding Magellan’s proposed expedition to the Spice Islands. This is a pivotal scene in Diaz’s film.
The five-ship fleet of the Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago left Spain on 20 September 1519 with about 270 men. Victoria was an 85-ton ship with an initial crew of about 42. The expedition’s flagship and Magellan’s own command was the carrack Trinidad. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the ships continued south along the eastern coast of South America. Entering the Strait of Magellan on 1 November 1520, Luis de Mendoza, the Spanish captain of the Victoria staged a mutiny against Magellan. Luis de Mendoza and Gaspar Quesada, captain of Concepcion, were executed and their remains hung on gallows on the shore.
Juan de Cartagena, captain of San Antonio was marooned on the coast of Patagonia as punishment by Magellan. He also left a problematic Spanish friar there with him to perish. When Magellan discovered a couple of his ship’s men engaged in buggery, he summarily has one of them beheaded in front of the crew. Worrying that the ship’s priest might betray one of his confessions, he arranged to strand the man of God on a deserted island in Patagonia along with Mendoza.
Magellan’s fleet left the strait on November 28, 1520. Confident that Asia lay not far beyond, Magellan decided against stopping to replenish supplies, despite the desertion of the San Antonio, which headed back to Spain with much of the fleet’s provisions. The decision proved to be a deadly one. It would be not weeks but three months before an island large enough to stop at was sighted. Twenty men died of starvation and scurvy along the way and more lay seriously ill on deck.
The fleet passed through to the Pacific Ocean, which Magellan himself named Mar Pacifico, after his crew experienced the terrible storms of the south Atlantic. The expedition endured many hardships, including sabotage and mutinies by the mostly Spanish crew, including Juan Sebastíano Elcano (the surviving captain of the world of circumnavigation around the world); starvation, scurvy, storms, and hostile encounters with indigenous people also beset the voyage. The fleet crossed the Pacific in 98 days, with Magellan himself at the helm of the Victoria.
They stopped in Guam and then the Philippines, before successfully reaching the Moluccas in November 1521. They welcomed the sudden appearance of men in canoes as the fleet approached Guam – native Chamorros. For Magellan’s men, it meant they had found food and fresh water and possibly an end to the impossibly gigantic ocean sea. The Chamorro couldn’t get enough of them, literally. They began basically looting Magellan’s ships, stealing whatever they could, all moving faster than the ailing crew could come to grips with. Magellan led forty armed men ashore where they “burned forty or fifty houses together with many boats, and killed seven men.”
On March 17, 1521, Magellan and his crew first came into contact with inhabitants of the Homonhon Island, which would later become part of the archipelago known as the Philippines. They soon proceeded to Limasawa, where the first Catholic mass in the Philippines was celebrated. Antonio Pigafetta (1480?-1534?), an expedition member, wrote in A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation that two indigenous leaders participated in the mass: Rajah Colambu, ruler of Limasawa, and Rajah Siagu, ruler of Butuan, both of whom kissed the cross and prayed with the crew.
Next, the expedition headed to Cebu, where the king and queen of the island and their subjects showed signs of embracing the Catholic faith. In the film, Magellan brings a statue of the Baby Jesus Christ to the hut of the ruler an offered to help heal the scurvy that has afflicted his young son.
On the surface, the acceptance of Catholicism affirmed the narrative of a superior Spanish civilization and its deity. However, Pigafetta’s account points to a larger political context of inter-group rivalries. It seems that accepting Christianity had partly to do with gaining advantage in a competitive political environment. Pigafetta relates how Magellan offered weapons to those who would become Christian, and an episode in which a king, in the context of contemplating conversion, complained about local notables who would not obey him. Magellan responded by threatening said leaders with loss of life and property.
Local leaders had to weigh Magellan’s intentions. Pigafetta tells of a Muslim merchant from Siam who warned a local ruler about the newcomers, saying they were “those who conquered Calicut, Malacca and all Upper India.” Avoiding conflict with Magellan would have been in the interest of some rulers. When appeasing the outsiders was not seen as advantageous, the narrative of Spanish exceptionalism ruptured and had terrible consequences.
The chief of Mactan Island, Lapulapu, saw no reason to accede to the Spanish Crown. He had a sizable force and was not intimidated. When Magellan threatened violence for Lapulapu’s rejection of Spanish demands. In the film, Lav Diaz incorporates the aspect of myth of a monster slaughter named Lapulapu and claim that it is a real threat. The chieftain managed to find 2,000 men to encounter the weakened forces of Magellan. We never see the battle but the many corpses laying on the shore battle ensued. Vastly outnumbered, Magellan and several crew members lost their lives, as recorded in Pigafetta’s account. In actual Battle of Mactan, which is elided in favor of presenting a string of the battle’s fallen along the beach. Diaz excels not in action but in portraiture.
Afterward, the expedition led by Juan Sebastíano Elcano traveled through the Indian and Atlantic oceans, incurring more losses, and limped back to Spain in 1522. Of the five ships and 270 men that departed in 1519, only one ship – the Victoria – returned with 18 men. It was only 50 years later that Spain finally managed to establish a foothold in the Philippines with the founding of Manila in 1571, but that too was heavily conditioned by local interests.
Clearly a lot of money went into the historically accurate costumes of Magellan, as well as a model reconstruction of the Victoria. The film bluntly puts its historical horrors on display, but it’s careful not to explicitly posit their causes. Diaz’s Magellan is a distant observer of new lands and customs until the locals’ “heresy” of keeping their idols ignites a rage that only appeared once before: Magellan is not interested in mainstream appeal. It has its moments of planning for the voyage, life at sea, and the difficulties of settlement, but it primarily functions as a series of tableaux, creating vivid images that convey the key ideas of Diaz’s script. Dialogue and action are secondary to the painterly visions he crafts.
Bare-chested natives wander the forests in quietude as they go about their business. The sun sets behind Magellan’s ship, the Trinidad, in a blaze of orange. Eventually these two worlds will collide, with bodies strewn on a water-lapped shore bathed in a crepuscular purple. Diaz shares cinematography duties with regular collaborator Larry Manda and Spanish DoP Artur Tort to frame shots that contrast the Philippines’ natural beauty with the polished but corrupting influence of the Spanish settlers.
Magellan is a deliberate counterargument to any notion about the importance of European conquest, as it examines in stark detail how devastating these efforts were in reaping havoc on indigenous people. While this was necessary context to show, Diaz goes even further in examining the moral inadequacy of his subject, and subjects them to the types of misery that would never be cited in textbooks.
