To engage with Magellan, Lav Diaz’s narrative retelling of the Portuguese explorer’s colonial campaign in Southeast Asia, one must accept that it is self-consciously interventionist. Running at a lengthy 160 minutes, the film uses space, movement, and composition to construct a historical retelling of colonization written in blood and sacrifices. It isn’t simply about the explorer’s fatal voyage to the Philippines. With Gael García Bernal delivering a performance of understated anguish, playing Magellan as a man spiritually bankrupted by his own violence, the film becomes an exercise in mise-en-scène properties that refuses to let us look away from historical atrocities. It is also an examination of how Christianity became weaponized as a tool of conquest, and how religious rhetoric masked genocidal intent. Once you surrender to Diaz’s vision, Magellan will reward you with something closer to the truth and realize that cinema can illuminate historical reality in ways unique to cinema alone.
Each shot in Magellan unhurriedly lasts for a minute, sometimes more. The camera stands still, perpetually mounted to a tripod, each frame possessing volumetric depths. Characters and moving objects don’t simply occupy space; they move through it with the precision of figures in Renaissance paintings; their placement often adheres to the golden ratio. Rivers flowing, ships sailing, and wind moving through grass appear to know their role in the composition. It is not merely an aesthetic flourish; it is the film’s organizing principle of dynamic relations between foreground and background. In Diaz’s staging, humans occupy the foreground while nature–indifferent, ancient, and seemingly permanent–dominates the background. Although he uses established stars such as Bernal and many other actors, the spatial arrangement employs them in a sense that film theorist André Bazin1 literarizes “men as an accessory […] in counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character.”
Consider how the film handles the beach. In Magellan, we see the film returning to beaches repeatedly, but each time the meaning shifts. The beach is never neutral; it’s always a site of violence, consequence, or grief. The film opens with the gruesome aftermath of the Capture of Malacca, bodies scattered across the shore, Magellan himself injured but persistent in the battle. This establishes the beach as a space of colonial aggression from the very first frames. Later on, we see European widows on another shore, fully clothed in black from head to toe, grieving husbands who died attempting to invade Malacca. The costumes, worn as grief, are contained within the structures of Christian mourning. These women stand as monuments to colonial ambition’s human cost, though they mourn those who chose to be invaders. Later in Cebu, we witness indigenous women on a beach transformed by colonial presence. They are naked except for traditional accessories, sending their dead children to the sea, children killed by illness. The contrast is devastating. Where European grief is clothed and constrained, indigenous grief is exposed, vulnerable, and raw. Where colonial widows mourn men who died as aggressors, indigenous mothers mourn children who died as victims of forces they never invited. And finally, the beach becomes the site of Magellan’s own defeat. Bodies broken in battle as indigenous forces resist conversion by force. The cycle completes itself: the beach that witnessed colonial violence at Malacca witnesses colonial failure in Cebu. What began as a space of European aggression became a space of European mortality.
There is a painterly quality to how Diaz and co-cinematographer Artur Tort stage the scenes. But film, as the late theorist David Bordwell2 noted, “has one resource that painting lacks. Our tendency to notice visual differences is strongly aroused when the image includes movement.” In Magellan’s deliberately paced scenes, this principle transforms every gesture into a major event. Sometimes a scene achieves perfection simply through characters or objects moving to fill in a white space. The white spaces that sometimes appear in Diaz’s compositions are made notably visible in anticipation of an entrance. Sometimes a still scene shows the corpses of indigenous people, only for a colonizer to fill the white space and enter the frame with aesthetic precision. As Bordwell2 observes, “The simplest way to achieve compositional balance is to center the frame on the human body. Filmmakers often place a single figure at the center of the frame and minimize distracting elements on the side,” but Diaz and Tort often take no easy route to perfect a shot. “Balanced composition is the norm, but unbalanced shots can also create strong effects,” Bordwell2 states, and Diaz exploits both principles throughout the film.
Diaz’s approach to lighting also reveals both naturalistic precision and symbolic intent. In a scene between Magellan and his pregnant wife Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), heartbroken over his decision to leave, we watch as sparse, overcast grey skies gradually fill with sunlight. The room, once reduced to silhouette, comes alive as golden light exposes the imperfect white paint on its walls. Later, when the ghost of Magellan’s wife appears as a phantasm in his dream sequence (recognizable as such without any explanatory dialogue), light hits her body but diffuses softly, achieving an ethereal, ghostlike quality. Midway through the film, the camera captures the moon in all its luminous beauty, then cuts to two men having sex beneath a ship. The supposedly dark, drab interior is illuminated by that same blue moonlight. These sequences exemplify Diaz’s meticulous formal approach, where every light source is justified and every shadow accounted for to produce meanings.
The film’s most damning insight concerns Magellan’s weaponization of Christianity. In a pivotal scene, a priest attempts to absolve Magellan of his sins through confession. But Magellan betrays this sacred ritual, using it instead to extract intelligence about potential treason. When the priest refuses to betray the sanctity of confession, he is abandoned and cast aside like any other tool that has outlived its usefulness. This scene crystallizes the film’s understanding of colonial Christianity, where it is not used as genuine faith for salvation but as an apparatus of control and justification for slaughter. Magellan speaks the language of salvation while practicing the grammar of domination. The film shows us indigenous rituals before and after colonization, emphasizing how deeply rooted these communities are in their own spiritualism. Here, the contrast is stark yet again. Where indigenous practice appears integrated with the natural world, colonial Christianity arrives as a foreign imposition, requiring the destruction of existing systems of meaning and belief.
Watching Magellan, I realized cinema (with its capacity to manipulate space, light and movement) can approximate something closer to the truth. The film doesn’t just tell us this. It makes us feel it, and sit with it for 160 carefully composed minutes. In doing so, it reminds us why formal properties of film, precisely deployed, can illuminate historical truth in ways no other medium can match.
Footnotes
- Pramaggiore, M., & Wallis, T. (2008). Film: A Critical Introduction. Laurence King Publishing Ltd ↩︎
- Bordwell, D., Thompson, K., & Smith, J. (2024). Film Art: An Introduction (12th ed.). McGraw Hill LLC ↩︎
