After an extensive festival tour kicking off at Cannes Film Festival, Lav Diaz’s formally rigorous epic Magellan will be coming to U.S. theaters beginning on January 9, 2026. Selected as the Philippines’ Oscar entry and led by Gael García Bernal, Janus Films has now released the first U.S. trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “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.”
Alistair Ryder said in his Cannes review, “It’s a major statement on how cinema repurposes historical tales––often cementing the definitive take on disputed fact, despite narrative liberties taken––trapped inside a minor work. The circumstances surrounding Magellan’s death in the Battle of Mactan only have one recorded eyewitness, and by belatedly making us question the reliability of this sole narrator through his take on events, it gives the illusion of a weightier genre reconstruction than what was actually presented onscreen. Within the body of the work itself, Diaz only appears to twist convention through omission; the one big battle scene is a deliberately anti-climactic static take, shot at a distant remove, of three boats clumsily firing cannons at each other, like the anti-Master and Commander.”
See the trailer and poster below.
The post Magellan Trailer: Lav Diaz’s Epic Opens This January first appeared on The Film Stage.
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