In Lav Diav’s Magellan, Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) sets out to cross the Pacific Ocean from Portugal but finds his multiple voyages undone by a crippling paranoia and brutal desire to oppress others, both his crew and the natives he meets and attempts to quell and convert along the way.
Awards Buzz spoke to Diaz about this fascinating, contradictory figure and what compelled him to make a film about him:
“If you’re a Filipino, then he’s been a part of our lives. Culturally, everything, politically, spiritually, everything starts with Magellan. The Catholic Philippines, the Christian Philippines, started within colonialism, within imperialism, it all started with him. So, it’s just a fixture in our culture. There are songs, there are poems about him, there are books, children’s books, and oral history as well. You hear him every day in our lives in the country. The film came naturally. When somebody said, hey, can we do something, a co-production between Spain and Portugal, I said, Magellan is the easiest subject for that.”
On the questions he needed to answer before he made the film, Diaz shared:
“Of course, issues of colonialism, the discourse on those things, and the idea of impositions, fractures created by these long histories of impositions by the West on us, erasing our past, erasing our names. So those are the things that I want to discuss in the film, of course. And at the same time, I also want to put the gaze, to balance the gaze, not just the gaze of the colonialists. Most of the books that we read, it’s from the West, it’s always the eye of the European white man. And in the film, you can see that I balance it. There’s the gaze of the indigenous, there’s the gaze of the pristine Malays before they came to us and fractured our culture.”
Watch the video above to hear about his selection of García Bernal for the title role and what he stills wants to explore about this subject.
Magellan was the official Oscar submission for Best International Feature representing the Philippines and is currently playing in theaters.
