“A gorgeous, hypnotic, and contemplative epic about conquest, conversion, mythmaking, and family.”

Lav Diaz may be one of the most important living directors. His oeuvre is entirely his own. It’s monumental, singular, and one of a kind because of his framing, pacing, and sheer scope. Each new film he makes is an event. Each must be seen, even when they stretch to eight or ten hours, and even when they test endurance. That endurance is part of his cinema, and like time itself, it overwhelms you. Yet with Magellan, which premieres in this year’s New York Film Festival, Diaz delivers what feels like a “short” film for him, at a mere 160 minutes, and in doing so creates one of his most refined, majestic, and gripping works. Returning to his rare use of color, Diaz has crafted a gorgeous, hypnotic, and contemplative epic about conquest, conversion, mythmaking, and family, while still critiquing authoritarian exploitation and the lure of power. It is at once historical and contemporary and may well stand as his greatest film yet and one of the best films of the year.

Set in the 16th century, the film follows Ferdinand Magellan, played tremendously and with astonishing nuance by Gael García Bernal, through his travels from Malaysia to Spain to the Philippines. For Western, non-Portuguese and non-Brazilian audiences, Magellan may often be reduced to a few lines in a textbook: the first captain whose voyage circumnavigated the globe, though he himself was killed before the journey was completed. Diaz refuses that reduction. His film instead focuses on the texture of the man’s exploits, his conquests, and his attempts at religious conversion in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

The film is structured in three parts. The first is set in Malacca, Malaysia, where Magellan participates in the capture of Malacca under Afonso de Albuquerque (played by film critic Roger Koza). The second follows Magellan to Sevilla in Spain, after falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration. Instead, Magellan aligns himself with the Spanish crown and embarks on a voyage for Spain. This section is long, expansive, and entrancing, a sea journey that becomes a test of hunger, mutiny, and questions of loyalty. But loyalty to what? To crowns (Portuguese or Spanish)? To Christ, in the guise of mission and conversion? To Magellan himself? Or to family, to Beatriz, Magellan’s wife, waiting at home? Diaz makes every kind of purity suspect: purity to nation, purity to religion, purity to family. All can be compromised and all are questioned.

The third section arrives in the Philippines, where Magellan successfully converts some locals before facing open rebellion. At the Battle of Mactan he is killed by locals supposedly led by the chief Lapu-Lapu, a figure celebrated as a national hero in Filipino history. Diaz films the battle tensely, with staggering frames of violence and beauty. It is horrifying, but also painterly, almost impossibly composed. Each shot is so carefully rendered it could hang as a Renaissance canvas, yet the screams, wounds, and traumas of colonial encounter are devastatingly present.

Diaz spent seven years researching Magellan. One of his most intriguing inclusions is Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), Magellan’s wife. Historical records give us little about her, but Diaz presents her as an almost angelic counterpoint to her husband’s ambition and as a guide within his heart and soul. García Bernal plays their bond with tenderness as his glances and eyes show his love and longing for his wife. Diaz juxtaposes this with Magellan’s cruelty and greed so that his love for Beatriz becomes a parallel life, a dream of family as opposed to his dream of conquest. In one devastating moment Magellan brings Christ to a Filipino child suffering illness. The gesture is deluded but also moving and is a recognition that family, suffering, and the desire to heal are shared across cultures. The complexity of these juxtapositions is what keeps Magellan from ever becoming a simple film about villains. It is about the human condition itself and about the contradictions of faith, ambition, and destruction.

Visually, Magellan is overwhelming. It is Diaz’s first color film in over a decade (since Norte, the End of History). Cinematographer Artur Tort, a frequent collaborator of Albert Serra (who co-produced Magellan), bathes the film in painterly radiance. Every shot is composed like a myth and every image layered with depth. The sea sequences in particular are breathtaking. The light glances off water and the boat in shades that feel both divine and menacing. The Philippine jungle, too, is shot luminously, creating a sense of a lush environment that still is full of danger.  At times the cinematography recalls Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, with its detailed painterly compositions and use of stationary cameras, and at other times it reminds one of the luminous canvases of Renaissance paintings. Yet ultimately the look is Diaz’s own, with color used for both beauty and terror and every hue saturated with history and blood.

Thematically, Magellan is revisionist and urgent. Diaz has said his goal was to fight against historical clichés, both of Magellan and of Lapu-Lapu. He probes the accuracy of these figures.  How much is fact, how much is invention, and how much is myth designed to embolden?  Per Diaz, in Filipino history Lapu-Lapu is a mythic figure.  Diaz compares him to Marcos and Duterte who used authoritarian mythmaking to embolden their regimes. Diaz insists that myth is itself a political weapon. “It’s very difficult to live in the real world with this mythmaking,” he has said, “… because we are always being fooled.” This is the thematic center of the film. History is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.

Sound plays an equally vital role in the film. As always for Diaz, much happens off-screen, right outside the frame.  In Magellan there are cries of suffering and sounds of horror carried on the wind that are heard but not seen. Language, too, matters. Diaz does not always stick to peninsular Portuguese and Castilian Spanish dialogue, but occasionally instead weaves Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish into the film. It is a choice heavy with meaning as a way of refusing the flattening of colonial history to that of Europeans and instead giving meaning and strength to the local tongues of the conquered.

In the end, Magellan is more than a historical film. It is a continuation of Diaz’s life’s work, from Evolution of a Filipino Family to From What Is Before to Season of the Devil, interrogating dictatorship, colonialism, and the human condition. But it is also a leap forward. It pushes Diaz’s vast cinematic vision into a form that feels both monumental and accessible. His earlier “shorter” works, such as Genus Pan and The Woman Who Left, hinted at how his ideas could be carried in more manageable durations without losing density. But Magellan surpasses them. At 160 minutes, it feels no less epic, no less layered, and no less demanding than the ten-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family or the sweeping A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery. Instead, the relative brevity sharpens the film’s impact. Every image lands with precision and every scene has deep meaning and historical significance.

If Norte was a radical reworking of Dostoevsky in the Philippines and if The Woman Who Left was a devastating parable of injustice and endurance, Magellan may be Diaz’s most expansive film in miniature. His ability to condense the sweep of history, myth, and politics into just under three hours shows, once more, why Diaz is not simply a Filipino director but one of the great filmmakers of our time.