“Screening: Magellan” (Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies)

DCP | 2025 | Lav Diaz | Portugal, Spain, Philippines, France, Taiwan | 163 minutes |

Portuguese, Spanish, Cebuano, French w/ English subtitles

 

Free admission. No registration required. Please arrive early to secure a seat.

 

Premiered at 2025 Cannes Film Festival | 90% on Metacritic!

 

At the dawn of the modern era, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) navigated a fleet of ships to Southeast Asia, attempting the first voyage across the vast Pacific Ocean. On reaching the Malay Archipelago, the crew pushed to the brink of madness in the harshness of the high seas and overwhelming natural beauty of the islands, Magellan’s obsession leads to a rebellion and reckoning with the consequences of power. A vast, globe-spanning epic from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY), MAGELLAN presents the colonization of the Philippines as a primal, shocking encounter with the unknown and a radical retelling of European narratives of discovery and exploration.

 

“Diaz is less interested in his personal affairs than in the meaning of notions like discovery and what it portends when one group of people violently imposes itself on another, which also makes this a story of imperialism…The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.” -Manolha Dargis, NYT

 

Introduction by French film critic and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma Emmanuel Burdeau

 

Presented by Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLIAS)