Magellan (film)

Development

Director Lav Diaz conceptualized the film with production company Rosa Filmes under the working title Magellan, which would portray a group of Filipinos who travel to Portugal to trace Magellan's origins in Portugal. The film aimed to "reverse the look between the coloniser and the empire".^[14] Diaz, who announced the film in 2019 as "Beatrice, The Wife", was inspired by the life of Magellan's wife Beatriz Barbosa de Magallanes, whom he married two years before he set off on the Magellan expedition.^[15] Diaz wrote on the film with a focus on Beatriz, and found the dearth of text written about her allowed creative liberties. During his research, Diaz realized Lapulapu may have been fictional; information on Lapulapu from primary sources was not clear and he shifted the film's focus on that aspect.^[12][2][16] The film's production team travelled to Seville and Lisbon to study archival materials and scout for filming locations.^[16][2]

Diaz stated his seven years of research into historical sources led him to portray Lapulapu, the datu of Mactan, as a myth rather than a historical figure.^[17] He said Lapulapu may have been created by Rajah Humabon to discourage Magellan's crew from converting more people into Christianity, and that "no one ever saw Lapulapu". Because of Lapulapu's widespread and official recognition as a historical figure in the Philippines,^{[18][19][20][21]} Diaz said his interpretation might be criticized as "revisionist".^[22]

Gael Garcia Bernal, who portrays Magellan, learned of the project from Joaquim Sapinho, met producers Sapinho and Albert Serra in Berlin to discuss his role, and later met with Diaz in Lisbon.^[16] Gael, who speaks Spanish, learned to speak Portuguese to play Magellan. Hazel Orencio, who portrays Juana, learned to speak Cebuano (Bisaya) for this film; she was helped by Sanny Joaquin, a native speaker of the language and assistant director of the film.^[2]

Filming

Principal photography took place in the towns Sampaloc and Mauban, both in Quezon, Philippines, in November 2024; this was followed by filming in southern Portugal and Cádiz, Spain. Production in the Philippines ended in December.^[8][23][24] The production used a replica of Ferdinand Magellan's ship Victoria.^[23] During filming, Diaz fell ill with tuberculosis.^[25]

Arthur Tort, producer Albert Serra's regular collaborator, was the director of photography alongside Diaz. Scenes were filmed using multiple Panasonic Lumix GH7 digital cameras, in 4:3 aspect ratio: Tort used the same equipment in Pacifiction (2022) and Afternoons of Solitude (2024).^[26]

Filming concluded in early 2025, and post-production finished in time for the Cannes premiere.^[24] During post-production, footage was divided into two feature films – Magellan and a second film with a nine-hour cut entitled Beatriz The Wife, portraying Beatriz's side of the story.^[8][24]

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 48 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Magellan blends Lav Diaz's slow cinema rigor with the biopic form to create a visually hypnotic, deliberately paced historical epic that immerses viewers in a spiritually charged meditation on power, mythology, and colonial ambition."^[42] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Reviewers generally praised Magellan as a slow cinema film. The Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzer remarked that the film was "exquisitely crafted" and may be one of Diaz's most accessible works for its relatively short runtime, while emphasizing that its austere, meditative style still places it firmly within the director's body of work.^[43] Jonathan Romney of Screen International characterized it as a "sardonic, detached but compelling study",^[44] while Josh Slater-Williams of IndieWire similarly considered it as one of the director's "most fascinating achievements", calling it a "hypnotizing historical and spiritual epic" and praising its immersive qualities across decades of history, something he argued few such stories successfully achieve.^[45] Variety's Guy Lodge described the film as "stunningly mounted" and "politically rigorous", noting that it is comparatively short for Diaz, but still "no artistic compromise", with the spirit of slow cinema intact.^[46]

Other critics emphasized Magellan's visual style and scope, with particular praise for the cinematography of Tort and Diaz. The cinematography uses a tableau vivant style and chiaroscuro, which the New York Times's Manohla Dargis compares with Renaissance art.^[47] The film is also composed of "muted colors", in contrast to Diaz's prior black and white films.^[48] Several reviewers commented on the use of mundane imagery to emphasize the violence present in the film,^[48] such as a tableaux of slaughtered bodies immediately following an introductory sequence set in a "picturesque" rainforest.^[49][50] The cinematography prefers to depict violence only to its aftermath, which The New Yorker's Justin Chang argues it decolonizes the viewer's gaze by removing the "visceral excitement" presented in violence.^[51] Dargis also asserted that the camera's minimal movements and square framing, which "tightly focuses the viewer's gaze", also yield a strong impact when the camera moves.^[47] Moreover, the aspect ratio brings the viewers "in observation rather than spectacle" for ABS-CBN's Ralph Revelar Sarza,^[52] Clarence Tsui of the South China Morning Post considered the film's stationary shots to reflect Magellan's megalomania.^[53] The film's lack of music and melodrama presents slow cinema at its "most viscerally rigorous and patient", according to a Los Angeles Times review.^[49]

Several critics also commended the cast's performances, particularly of Gael and Babon.^[48][47] The AV Club called the performance the best of Bernal's career.^[54] For Romney, Garcia Bernal's "muted performance [...] vividly evokes the physical and mental wear and tear on a voyager's being."^[44] In a more critical review, Daily Tribune's Stephanie Mayo describes Magellan as "costume-driven and staged" by citing anticipable and sparse dialogue, exaggerated expressions, and cinematography that "prevents audience engagement" throughout the film.^[55] After a comment on the film's limited dialogue, The Philippine Star's Le Baltar considers that the film refuses to be expository and exhaustive.^[50] Various critics regard Magellan as a story of imperialism,^[47] a tale on mutually-assured destruction,^[49] or a discussion on the violence an invaded "must stoop to themselves" for freedom.^[56]

The film received an honorable mention in The New Yorker magazine's Best Films of 2025 list.^[57]

Historical accuracy

The portrayal of Mactan chieftain Lapulapu as a myth drew mixed reactions from historians. In an article published on The Freeman, two unnamed Cebu-based historians strongly disputed Diaz's claim and said Lapulapu's existence is attested by Enrique of Malacca and Antonio Pigafetta, and that the account of Pigafetta, who witnessed the Battle of Mactan, is reliable. Other historians, including one The Freeman cited, said Lav Diaz had taken "artistic license".^[58] At an invitational screening, Ambeth Ocampo said Diaz had made a film, not a "doctoral dissertation", and criticized the anonymous historians in The Freeman article for commenting on a film they had not seen.^[59] University of San Carlos associate professor George Borrinaga, in the same The Freeman article, said the film is a means of encouraging discussions about Lapulapu and that the lack of primary sources other than Pigafetta persuaded Diaz that Lapulapu is a myth; Borringa advised viewers to take the claim with a "grain of salt".^[58]

In Ocampo's review published on the Philippine Daily Inquirer, he noted "minor" inaccuracies, such as how the historical Santo Niño image depicted in the film was actually naked and white-skinned, while blood compact ceremonies were conducted using blood drawn from under the breast, rather than from the arms as depicted in the film.^[60]

Diaz anticipated criticisms of "historical revisionism".^[22] He said Filipinos should reconsider Rajah Humabon's place in Philippine history, and that his portrayal of events of the film is the result of his own research.^[61]

Some critics described the use of Cebuano language in Magellan as excessively modern. The Asian Cut's Paul Enicola wrote in his Toronto International Film Festival review: "More contentious is the use of Cebuano here, which occasionally veers into modern registers that jar against the historical setting". He added as a fluent Cebuano speaker, he found it distracting, though not a significant issue in his viewing experience.^[3] An article by &Asian quoted a few Cebuano-speaking moviegoers, who said the film's language is rather "anachronistic" due to its "minimal" borrowings from Hiligaynon and Tagalog.^[4]

Accolades