Filipino director Lav Diaz has hinted that a short cut of his long-awaited feature starring Gael García Bernal as 16th Century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan could premiere in Cannes this May, and revealed a “near-death” experience after the shoot wrapped at the end of 2024.
Speaking in a masterclass at the Doha Film Festival’s Qumra event on Sunday, Diaz said he had just finished cutting a two hour, 45-minute version of the film, even though his long-term plan is for a nine-hour movie.
Quizzed on whether it might be bound for Venice, where he won the Golden Lion in 2016 for The Woman Who Left and has also debuted another five films, the director replied that rather it was aiming for a debut in “an important festival in France”.
Diaz was last in Cannes Official Selection with Norte, the End of History, which premiered in Un Certain Regard in 2013, while his film The Halt (Ang Hupa) premiered in Directors’ Fortnight in 2019.
The Cannes Film Festival will reveal the bulk of its Official Selection in a press conference in Paris on Thursday, while Directors’ Fortnight will unveil its line-up on April 15.
First announced with the working title Beatriz, The Wife, the film was inspired by the life of Magellan’s wife Beatriz Barbosa de Magallanes. The pair married in 1517, living together for just two years before Magellan set off on an expedition to southeast Asia, from which he would never return.
Produced by Andergraun Films (Spain), Rosa Filmes (Portugal) and Epicmedia Productions (Philippines), the film was first announced in 2019, with the synopsis suggesting Beatriz would be at the heart of the story.
Talking to Deadline after the masterclass, Diaz said that the short version had been retitled Magellan and would focus more on the explorer, although the nine-hour cut would include more of Beatriz’s story.
“We started with Beatriz the wife. That was my initial foray into the project eight years ago. When you do research on the life of Magellan, there’s only three lines about the wife. You see how they marginalized women were during that era. In the 15th and 16th centuries, women don’t exist. Everything is male and macho,” said Diaz.
“I wanted to work on this mysterious woman, I did my research for like six years before starting the film. I discovered a lot, and you can see that with the nine-hour work, but in my research I found there’s a lot of misleading misconceptions. We have to rewrite history on Magellan.”
Diaz revealed he had fallen gravely ill after the production wrapped in the Philippines last December, following filming in Portugal and Spain.
“I got very sick after the shoot. I didn’t know that I was sick already but I had pneumonia which eventually became tuberculosis. I was vomiting blood. I thought I’m going to die. It became a personal journey as well to understanding immortality,” he revealed.
Formative Years
Earlier in the masterclass, touching on New Jersey-set drama West Side Avenue, Norte, The End Of History and The Woman Who Left, Diaz talked about his childhood in Datu Paglas in the southern region of Mindanao in a house without electricity but full of books.
“My father was a cinema addict,” he said of his first introduction to film, explaining his parents had originally moved there in the 1950s as volunteer teachers as part of a government scheme to open up the region.
“I grew up in poverty. I didn’t see electricity in our place until college. We grew up in the mud with snakes, mosquitos, crocodiles in the middle of the forest,’ he recounted.
Diaz’s later childhood also coincided with the beginning with of Ferdinand Marcos’ 20-year dictatorship, and his imposition of martial law in 1972, as part of a crackdown on political dissent.
“Occasionally, the military machine would come and knock on the door and sew fear on the population, especially in the late 60s when the Muslim secessionist movement started to grow. The place I called paradise became a nightmare. It became like Trump,” he added, in the first of numerous jibes at the U.S. President and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Diaz ended up in Manila in the late1970s for his higher education at a time when the cinema scene in the Filipino capital was at full tilt, making 200 films a year, and where he discovered cineastes such Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal and Mike de Leone
“The biggest influence on me was Lino Brocka. I was first in first year college and the literature teacher said, ‘Go and watch Manila in the Claws of Light’,” Diaz recalled referring to Brocka’s 1975 neo-noir about a young man from the provinces who travels to the capital in search of his lover.
“It was the first socially conscious Filipino cinema that I saw. It changed my whole system, my whole perspective… I realised that I can use cinema to change people, to be part of the cultural thing, cultural movement. It really changed my whole life.”
Talking to Deadline after the masterclass, Diaz acknowledged that these early experiences were intertwined with his filmmaking to this day.
“I was shaped by what happened in my youth so it’s always like that. You cannot escape the past… It reflects on what’s stored in your brain, what’s stored in your memory and what shaped you when you were young. You can’t escape. My parents they’re socialists, they struggled, they saw things differently. It was all about progressive thinking, trying to help people. I couldn’t escape that kind of attribute, aesthetic that my parents showed me.”
Some 50 years later, with populist leaders on the rise worldwide, Diaz believes like his parents that education is the only way out.
“We have to pause a bit and start thinking what’s happening to America? What’s happening to Israel? What’s happening to Russia? We have to think properly… and know that the key to this is educating people, having dialogue with people, using cinema for dialogue, music for dialogue, all the mediums of the art, all the mediums of communication, newspapers, radio, tv,” he said. “These populist leaders that we have, Trump, [Rodrigo] Duterte in the Philippines, they’re all over the world. So we cannot fight them. If we fast track everything, we can never never win.”
