“Magellan, a tale of death, disease, mutiny, and mutually assured destruction, is the most powerful anti-imperialist epic I’ve seen since Lucrecia Martel’s Zama.”

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

Magellan is a major work, one destined to draw greater awareness to its maker Laz Diaz, Philippine cinema’s reigning auteur. His first film to feature international star power—Gael García Bernal, exceptional in the role, tops the bill—it uses the life and career of 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Bernal) to interrogate the mechanisms and Messiah complex of Europe’s imperialist ​“Age of Discovery.” The seafaring epic, which begins and ends with bloodshed in Southeast Asia, tracks the exploits of the hubristic Magellan, dragging a fleet of Spanish ships across the Pacific Ocean in search of a new spice route to the East. Diaz thoroughly de-aggrandizes the fabled navigator, painting him as a tyrannical colonizer gripped by paranoia and blind purpose, soothed only by memories of the pregnant wife (Ângela Azevedo) he left behind. Taking an anticolonial lens to the legend, Diaz’s visually resplendent film—his first in colour in over a decade—is a staggering achievement.

In Portuguese, Spanish, Cebuano, and French with English subtitles

“If Magellan represents something of a historical, geographical, and budgetary expansion on Diaz’s long project of exploring cycles of historical violence in the Philippines, it does so without compromising any of the austerity and conceptual rigour familiar to fans of his films.”

Joshua Bogatin, Screen Slate

“[A] haunted dream of a movie … [Magellan] is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing.”

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Mesmerizing … [A] stunningly mounted, politically rigorous work, which confronts any viewers hoping for a sweeping biographical romp with a frank post-colonial perspective.”

Guy Lodge, Variety
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