The world of Lav Diaz is one where cinema and conscience often collide. His latest film, Magellan, continues that tradition, and this time the collision cuts deeper than ever.
Days after the New York Film Festival premiere, Diaz reflected over coffee: ‘I might not just face accusations of historical revisionism, but even excommunication from the Catholic Church.’ His remark followed a wave of online threats and criticism, proof of how provocative his retelling of early colonial history has become.
The film revisits one of the most contested encounters in world history: the first meeting between the Philippines and the West through the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan.
The backlash stemmed from Diaz’s daring interpretation that Lapu-Lapu, long celebrated as the first Filipino hero who killed Magellan, may be more myth than man, a symbol shaped by centuries of oral tradition and nationalist imagination. He goes further, suggesting that Rajah Humabon, often vilified for aligning with the Spaniards, may in fact be the first true national hero, a leader navigating the collision of cultures with political foresight and spiritual complexity.
For many Filipinos, those assertions felt like an assault on a sacred story of resistance. For Diaz, they were an invitation to examine how history, faith and identity were shaped by power and perception.
The premiere drew a sold-out crowd at the Walter Reade Theater. Before the screening, Janus Films hosted a reception at Café Paradiso across the street, where Diaz and Gael García Bernal mingled with guests, critics, and festival programmers. The mood was warm and expectant, shaped by curiosity about how Diaz would reinterpret the mythos of Magellan and Lapu-Lapu.
Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival, moderated the post-screening discussion and introduced Diaz as ‘one of the most important living filmmakers working in the language of time, memory and national history.’
Lim’s connection with Diaz spans more than a decade; as director of programming at film at Lincoln Center, he curated ‘Time Regained: The Films of Lav Diaz,’ the most comprehensive American retrospective of the director’s work. That early advocacy helped establish Diaz’s presence in the US arthouse circuit, paving the way for his return to Lincoln Center with Magellan.
Diaz said the story of Magellan has long lived in the Filipino consciousness. It marked the first recorded contact between the islands and the West, a beginning he wanted to reexamine for its loss, distortion and moral weight. ‘Ang kuwento ni Magellan ay koneksyon sa ating kasaysayan,’ he said. ‘Doon nagsimula ang kamalayan ng mga Pilipino.’
He spent seven years researching before production began, working in Seville and poring over archival materials. From Pigafetta’s chronicle to lesser-known European accounts, he compared contradictions and omissions. Diaz noted that several of Pigafetta’s descriptions do not make sense, such as the supposed thousands of native warriors who surrounded Magellan during the ‘Battle of Mactan.’ ‘You read it carefully, and it becomes clear that many of these numbers and scenes were exaggerated,’ Diaz said. ‘They were written from the viewpoint of survival and guilt, not truth.’
The result, he said, became a dialectical investigation: a personal act of returning to the source and confronting what history concealed.
Shot entirely on a Panasonic Lumix GH7, Magellan extends Diaz’s long-take realism into digital precision. Using only two lenses-a 12 mm and a 35 mm Panasonic-he and his small crew filmed across rugged terrain and unpredictable weather, capturing long sequences that mirrored the endurance of Magellan’s voyage.
For Gael García Bernal, playing Magellan was both demanding and revelatory. As a Mexican actor, he approached the role as an exploration of shared colonial legacies. ‘The concept of Magellan was fascinating from the start, especially coming from Lav,’ Bernal said. ‘It was an amazing and incredible challenge.’
Bernal first heard of the project from Portuguese producer and filmmaker Joaquim Sapinho. He and Gael initially spoke on the phone, later met in Berlin, and eventually Diaz, Gael and Joaquim came together in Lisbon.
Drawn by Diaz’s vision, he immersed himself in historical texts and languages to portray a man torn between faith, ambition and empire. He was particularly intrigued by Enrique, who is a Malay, Magellan’s enslaved interpreter, possibly the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the globe, whose story symbolizes the beginnings of global hybridity.
Making Magellan, Diaz said, was punishing. He wrote scenes daily during filming, guided by instinct and scholarship. ‘Pinuhunan ko ang buhay ko, muntik na akong mamatay sa pelikulang ito,’ he said. ‘Kahit sinong nagmamarunong na historiyano sa Pilipinas, handa akong harapin sila.’
Behind the camera, the production mirrored its own theme of struggle: betrayals, abandonment, personality clashes, and even blackmail attempts. Diaz said these tensions reflected the same human frailties that unraveled Magellan’s expedition centuries ago.
During the post-screening dialogue, the conversation shifted to the authorship of history. Diaz observed that Western accounts still dominate, leaving Filipino voices peripheral. His film, he said, attempts to restore those missing perspectives, the small human truths obscured by conquest.
Bernal added that the Pacific crossing remains ‘more uncertain than going to the moon,’ calling it one of humanity’s greatest leaps of faith. ‘Those men believed their survival meant divine purpose,’ he said.
When asked how he sustained himself through years of research and production, Diaz smiled. ‘Meditation, music and marijuana,’ he replied, drawing laughter from the audience. He added that art, like truth, requires clarity and compassion, a state reached only by slowing down and seeing the world without illusion.
For a filmmaker who has built his career on confronting myth, memory and power, it was a fitting epilogue, another chapter in a body of work that insists on reclaiming the Filipino story, frame by frame.
To Diaz, elevating Humabon is not an act of defiance but of reexamination. He describes Humabon as a ruler caught between loyalty to his people and the overwhelming force of a foreign faith. His conversion to Christianity, often dismissed as betrayal, was, in Diaz’s view, a pragmatic attempt at survival-an early form of diplomacy in the face of conquest.
‘Humabon understood the language of power,’ Diaz said. ‘He chose negotiation over annihilation.’
In that choice, Diaz finds not weakness, but courage: the beginning of a Filipino consciousness aware of both submission and resistance, faith and reason, tragedy and nationhood.