Diretor Lav Diaz hopes a 165-minute version of Magellan, his feature film starring Gael Garcia Bernal as Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, will debut at Cannes next month.
Formerly Beatrice, The Wife, the film has been retitled Magellan, with an as-yet-undetermined longer title. Diaz has shifted the focus away from Magellan’s relationship with his wife Beatrice, to take in more of the perspective of the conquered Malay people.
“It’s not just the perspective of the European anymore,” Diaz told Screen. “It’s a more advanced perspective of Southeast Asia. It’s always the white man’s burden every time we do historical things connected with Europe or America; I want to balance it.”
The film stars Garcia Bernal alongside a Portuguese actress as Beatrice, with Filipino, Portuguese and Spanish actors rounding out the cast.
Speaking at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra lab where he is a Master, Diaz said he “just finished” the film, which is “all about death”.
Diaz, who is known for his long films, told the Qumra audience that his cut is “around nine hours.”
“Some festivals, maybe they just want to show three hours, so the producers compromise, so they will see three hours of it,” said Diaz. “But I will have the full cut.”
“[The producers] are trying some very imposing festival in France,” said Diaz, referring to Cannes. “But I don’t know. They will be having some headache about it.”
Magellan has been in the works for several years, with Portuguese production outfit Rosa Filmes presenting it on its slate in 2019. It is also produced by Spain’s Andergraun Films and Epicmedia Productions from the Philippines.
Asked about the presence of violence in his work, Diaz said, “It’s the nature of my culture. Filipinos are very violent. Magellan found out – he came here, they killed him.”
Despite our best efforts to go into a film completely blind, sometimes we’ll catch online chatter or a snippet of a promotional interview that inevitably colors something about our first viewing of an anticipated movie. It could be gossip about stars not getting along that might affect your perception of their onscreen rapport, or the knowledge that a director was replaced by someone else partway into production due to creative differences.
In the arthouse world, a perhaps surprising example of game-changing pre-release context has emerged with Filipino independent filmmaker Lav Diaz and his latest movie, “Magellan“. But befitting the man behind several of the longest narrative films on record (e.g. “Evolution of a Filipino Family”), the bombshell in question is that “Magellan” — one of his shortest features of late at 160-ish minutes — was apparently intended to be nine hours in length. And that a nine-hour version may still be on the way, according to Diaz as recently as a month before “Magellan’s” world premiere at Cannes.
Should the nine-hour version eventually emerge for public consumption, it’s currently unclear whether it would be released as an “extended cut” of “Magellan” or branded as a new film with a new title. But the intriguing thing is that when this project was first announced in 2019, it did have a different working title, “Beatriz, The Wife”, with a synopsis suggesting that this title character would be a far greater focus for the story than she ultimately is in the two-and-a-half-hour version of “Magellan”.
Portrayed by Ângela Azevedo, Beatriz does still have a key role to play in Diaz’s film, which is named after her husband, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, played by Gael García Bernal (in one of his finest performances), whose star presence may be a factor in why a shorter, more digestible cut has debuted first as a possibly easier sell for international distributors. But a crucial thing about “Magellan” is that while Bernal has by far the most screen time of any performer and the title named after his character, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that the film is wholly about Ferdinand Magellan in the end, even if it does function as an atypical biopic of him.
A little breakdown of biographical information relevant to the film, if you’re behind on your reading about the early 16th century: Ferdinand Magellan was an ambitious navigator who’d been part of various expeditions on behalf of Portugal in India, Africa, the Malay Peninsula and more. After a disagreement with the Portuguese king, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to fund an expedition to fabled lands in the East, avoiding established Portuguese routes around southern Africa in order to help Spain get a foothold in the valuable spice trade from the Moluccas.
Along the way, the exhausting voyage involved various mutinies and crew deaths, and upon reaching the islands of the Malayan Archipelago, Magellan’s mind and ambitions changed. Conquest and conversion of the local population was his new goal.After brief opening credits listing only Diaz and Bernal, the film starts with a woman checking what seems to be stones in a stream, the camera capturing her from a far distance; apart from what looks like cuff bracelets on her arms and legs, she is entirely naked. Suddenly seeing something off-camera, this woman leaves her spot in the stream and runs away to update her tribe. “I saw a white man!” she says, causing a stir. “The promise of the gods of our ancestors is here!”
Excitement about the sighting prompts the local women to chant, “The God of Water has spoken! Praise be unto Him!” After this has gone on for a bit, the title card for “Magellan” abruptly drops with an air of foreboding. And with good cause. We’ll check back with these particular people, their faith and how that will be challenged later, but Diaz’s mission statement here — at least with this cut of the project — is to deconstruct the myth-making surrounding the Portuguese explorer, achieving a more historically accurate portrayal of Magellan’s attempts to colonize the Philippines, plus his earlier participation in the conquering of Malacca and other regions.
Diaz centers Magellan in the story as required, but always frames Portugal and Spain’s “glories” as abhorrent. It plays in stark contrast to Amazon Prime Video’s recent Spanish miniseries “Boundless,” which was created on the 500th anniversary of the First Circumnavigation of the World (or the “Magellan expedition”), stars Rodrigo Santoro as Magellan and is directed by Simon West of “Con Air” fame. (Diaz could make “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” or “The Expendables 2,” but West couldn’t make “Norte, the End of History.”)
In exploring violence across his seventeen-year narrative (be it the colonizers toward the colonized or the former fighting within their own ranks), Diaz notably avoids showing almost every instance of the acts actually being committed. The closest we get to an onscreen murder is a weapon being swung for the beheading of a mutinous shipmate during Magellan’s voyage, only for the film to cut away to something else before the neck is sliced.
Rather, what Diaz does through his characteristically long, unbroken takes is really make you linger in the horror of slaughter. Not so much in getting you up close with gory flesh wounds or dismembered body parts (excluding a notable exception late in the runtime), but in the constant presence of dead bodies within the frame. Many a long, uninterrupted speech or conversation between soldiers takes place in village or forest spaces littered with corpses, the body language of Magellan and his countrymen stepping around the slain being more akin to someone avoiding treading on dog shit than treating human lives lost with a modicum of respect. The avoidance of widescreen framing, making a lot of the compositions particularly tight, only helps to enhance that unease.
In its exploration of the first Filipino “encounter” with the West and the events leading up to it, Diaz’s confrontational film proves one of his most fascinating achievements: a hypnotizing historical and spiritual epic that’s immersive in a way that few decades-spanning stories successfully pull off. With that in mind, it’s intriguing to imagine quite what the proposed nine-hour expansion could be like. The “Release the Beatriz Cut” campaign starts here.
Diaz is one of the best directors working today and I have been looking forward to this one or anything new from him, but just give us fans the full cut in some way or another and let the ones who need a shorter version have it too. Let him cook! We also need more of his films on Blu-ray.
If “Gael Garcia Bernal as Magellan” sounds to you like a pretty cool Netflix series, you have never seen a film by Filipino auteur and slow-cinema master Lav Diaz. Known on the international festival circuit for his epically minimalist features with bladder-busting running times, his movies are challenging, high-art dramas made for a very select few — the opposite of the flashy, ADHD-friendly content found on streamers.
Premiering in Cannes, where Diaz’s most awarded film, Norte, the End of History, played in Un Certain Regard back in 2013, Magellan (Magalhães) is not for the impatient viewer who likes their explorer stories action-packed and easy to digest.
And yet this exquisitely crafted feature may be one of the director’s most accessible works to date. It clocks in at only 160 minutes (Diaz’s films often run twice that long, if not more), but, more importantly, provides an honest glimpse at a figure who famously opened the world up for exploration, while furthering the mass destruction wreaked by colonialism.
“I saw a white man!” an indigenous woman screams in the movie’s opening scene, which shows her working calmly by a river in a picturesque rain forest. Like the snake appearing in the Garden of Eden — a Biblical reference that will soon be forced upon tribes with their own religious culture — the arrival of Europeans on the shores of unexplored lands will carry evil into an innocent place, changing it for the worse.
That first sequence takes place during the Conquest of Malacca in 1511, which saw Magellan fighting under Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque. If you’re not familiar with this dark period, Diaz doesn’t necessarily make things clear enough to grasp. He’s less interested in historical facts and figures than in visually capturing what the start of colonial decimation looked like on both sides. Magellan never appears in his movie as a hero or antihero, but as a bold profiteer reaping what he can out of a global race to secure land through war and plunder. Guns, germs and steel indeed.
The narrative, which stretches from the bloody clashes on Malacca to Magellan’s death at the Battle of Mactan (Philippines) ten years later, portrays this decade of conquest and ruination with elegantly composed tableaux shot from a fixed position. Diaz is known for using black-and-white, but here he teams with Artur Tort (credited as both co-cinematographer and co-editor) to shoot with a rich color palette of green, brown and blue, finding beautifully detailed textures in locations on both sea and land. The villages recreated by production designers Isabel Garcia and Allen Alzola seem so authentic that you would think they had always been there, nestled in the jungle.
Certain images look like they were torn right out of 16th-century paintings, which is why Magellan is a movie you tend to gaze at rather than watch with full attention. Diaz often shows us the aftermath of battles, where dozens of bodies are artfully splayed on the ground, instead of the battles themselves. Lots of other drama happens off-screen, even if we do witness certain key moments from Magellan’s last years — whether it’s his decision to work under the Spanish crown after the Portuguese refused to back his last voyage, or his discovery of a passage to the South Pacific that became known as the Magellan Strait.
But the drama can be very stolid, borderline dull at times. Not that Garcia Bernal isn’t perfect for the part: Costumed in lots of fluffy shirts, he plays a fearless man with an immense ego who suffered for his success, making the whole profession of being a conquistador look less like a valiant enterprise than a major drag. But Diaz’s observant style (he never cuts within a scene; there’s no music to induce emotion) can keep us at arm’s length from events. Perhaps the most dramatic part of the film is the one that’s the most painfully stretched out, depicting Magellan’s long, relentless voyage (1519-1521) from Spain to the Spice Islands, which saw many crew members die along the way.
But whatever the Spaniards or Portuguese went through pales in comparison to all the tribespeople whom we see imprisoned, converted, enslaved or just plain murdered by Magellan and his men. The other main character in the film is Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), an indigenous man whom Magellan captures on Malacca and takes with him on all his subsequent journeys. He gradually becomes “civilized” (to use a colonialist term) as the narrative progresses, until the tides turn in the Philippines and we see him returning back to his initial state, freed from the shackles of European domination.
As much as Magellan is a film that will play to a highly select audience, it makes a subtle but loud political statement about the colonial mindset both then and now. When the conquistadors claim they are fighting so that “Islam shall finally disappear,” hoping to beat the Moors in securing more territory, it sounds a lot like speeches you hear from far-right pundits and politicians in Europe today. Diaz’s movie may resemble a magnificent time capsule — and one that we watch with a certain distance — but there are moments when its stark realism reminds us how easily history can repeat itself.
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Magellan (2025)
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