Magellan. 2025. Portugal/Spain/France/Philippines/Taiwan. Written and directed by Lav Diaz. With Gael García Bernal, Ângela Azevedo, Amado Arjay Babon. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, French; English subtitles. 163 min.
The peerless Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz creates allegorical fables that combine intimate portraiture with historical sweep. Whether he is working in documentary, epic fiction, or some strange hybrid of the two, Diaz’s novelistic characters—some loosely based on those of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy—are buffeted by social and political forces seemingly beyond their control or understanding. Diaz’s ingenious political conceit in Magellan is to shift the attention away from the Great Man of History (brilliant as Gael Garcia Bernal may be as the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan) to instead give voice to its marginalized characters, the women and the Indigenous peoples of the Malayan Archipelago, as they are are subjected to the merciless violence of empire building.
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