Magellan

Cult director Lav Diaz’s latest film portrays the Spanish explorer Magellan, from his early days as a young sailor to his gradual transformation into an increasingly tyrannical captain.

Magellan is perhaps Lavi Diaz's most accessible film to date, and for a director who mostly makes films lasting at least five hours. We meet the Portuguese navigator Magellan on several occasions in the early 1500s. When he marries his Beatriz in Seville, as a young sailor in Malacca and as an increasingly tyrannical captain, in encounters with the Malay locals and his own crew. Diaz highlights Magellan's path towards moral decline, as Werner Herzog did with the thematically related Aguirre (1972), but in his own naturalistic, slow-cinema style. The film is undoubtedly in favour of the local population, leaving the colonisers with little honour as their pretty clothing and minds become sullied by mud, greed and tropical diseases.

Jon Sæter