Dispatches from AFI Fest 2025: Magellan and Miroirs No. 3
By Joshua Silva, Edited by Enoch Lai
If All That is Left of You guides us from the inception of historical crisis (the Nakba) up to the present moment, Magellan — Filipino director Lav Diaz’s account of the titular explorer’s life –- takes us further back to the beginning of the modern world, and shows us the relative smallness of a man who altered time and space more substantially than most humans by ushering in the age of colonialism.
Despite this being Diaz’s biggest-budget film, it’s ironically one of his least narrative, trading his usual 19th-century-novelistic, heavily-plotted drama for a more conventional slow-cinema style — and in a brisk 165 minutes, far shorter than his usual films.
Magellan (Gael Garcia Bernal)’s legacy is as the catalyst of European colonialism, arguably the most violent phenomenon in human history. And yet when following him, we can only fathom the day-to-day drudgery of his life, which is plenty miserable too. We observe his pain: the pain of a gangrenous leg, of losing a young child, of sailing for months with no sight of land, foregrounded ahead of the greater historical barbarities being committed by the Portuguese Empire, which must remain implicit.
Magellan seeks freedom but is at the behest of a crown which was just as indifferent to him as he was to his crew. Magellan begins the film treated like a god, and on a note both bleak and hopeful, ends the film just as unfree (and — spoilers for 16th-century history — dead) as the Cebuanos whom he murdered. Diaz and cinematographer Arthur Tort’s wide-angle framing shows Magellan dwarfed by the jungles of Cebu, reversing his notion that nature is his subject.
For anyone watching the film, the Age of Empire yet-to-come still looms over the narrative (it’s now outlived Magellan by, oh, 515 years), yet the film instead ends with an image of freedom: the slave who was sold across various empires and displaced from his God now returned to his native Cebu, granted a reunion with his motherland that Magellan never was. Though the men who’ve “made history” may reign death upon all the earth, Diaz proposes that the only universal truth is that all, master and slave, will be returned unto that earth from which they came, dwarfed by the forces of nature that they seek to conquer.
Of lesser note was German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, a pastoral drama about Laura (Paula Beer), the signature Petzoldian woman, who survives a car crash that kills her boyfriend and is taken in by an older woman who witnessed the crash. Petzold lets us enjoy the German countryside’s atmosphere, but the drama is muted to the point of insignificance and the central psychological tension is telegraphed so quickly — at least for those familiar with this genre of European stranger-entering-a-family’s-home-life (Teorema, In the House,Visiting Hours,The Third Lover,La Ceremonie, and Merci pour le Chocolat — come to think of it a genre dominated by Claude Chabrol) — that there’s little mystery to the bulk of the film. The movie becomes more interesting in its last fifteen minutes as it switches up the drama, only to end rather abruptly without resolution. It introduces some of Petzold’s signature motifs (the fatal accident, the Vertigo-esque replacing of the dead, and the ways in which the past lives on in the present), but does not build them to any kind of gestalt.