Amazon Prime VideoAfter NASA picks up a trio of mysterious signals from within our own solar system, astronaut Roger Nelson is dispatched on a multi-year solo mission aboard the Magellan spacecraft to investigate the sources.
In 'Magellan,' starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Lav Diaz depicts the decade of devastation wreaked by European conquistadors in the Pacific.And yet this exquisitely crafted feature may be one of the director’s most accessible works to date. It clocks in at only 160 minutes (Diaz’s films often run twice that long, if not more), but, more importantly, provides an honest glimpse at a figure who famously opened the world up for exploration, while furthering the mass destruction wreaked by colonialism.
The mythology of Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) has reached such an entrenchment in the West that the name is synonymous, globally, with exploration. Yet for director Lav Diaz, and for many raised in the Philippines and in the Global South more generally, Magellan's history is marred with the bloody stains of colonialism.Clocking in at 160 minutes, Magellan is one of Slow Cinema pioneer Lav Diaz's shortest films. That length provides the perhaps erroneous notion that the film is one of his more accessible.
