San Diego Asian Film Festival 2025
Set during the Age of Discovery, in 1504 famed Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan discovers the Filipino land of Malacca, plus his subsequent on-going attempts to capture and colonize said lands and people.
The film is full of gorgeous views of the Phillipines, where it was filmed, the jungles and the beaches, full of life with Malaccan natives living their untroubled lives, until the advent of the Portuguese conquerors. Because, make no mistake, despite there being no commentary from a narrator or actual testimony from the natives, this is a movie about colonialization. The practice where one country establishes control over another, settles its people, exploits their resources, and imposes its own political, cultural, and especially religious, systems. Which is very much what the film does, with the unflinching honesty of the cameras eye, subjecting the audience to the destruction of the Malaccan kingdom right along with them, fully aware that this is what actually happened in history, with no pity, no mercy, and no end in sight.
We begin with Ferdinand (Gael Garcia Bernal) as a young man, as a crew member on the historic first voyage where they “discover” the ancient, already established state of Malacca, and like many exploring others before them, proceed to just lay waste to the indigenous people therein. The movie doesn’t focus generally on the violence of direct slaughter, but rather the messy, doom-laden aftermath, where this once lush and green land is now the grey of ashes and mass human slaughter.
From there we follow Magellan as he pursues a career in further exploration, armed with his faith in the Christian god, hardened soldiers already inured to killing “heathens”, and his own sense of superiority. Ferd proceeds to buy and “westernize” a Malaysian slave now called Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon) into his right-hand man, completely oblivious to what this does to Enrique himself. Back in his home territory of Lisbon, Ferd meets and marries Beatriz (Angela Azevedo), and while she could have been a temper to the shell hardening around him, Ferd proceeds to leave Beatriz there to wilt into sickness and death while she waits, faithfully, for him to come home to her.
Thus do we segue into the centerpiece of the film, a disastrous three-year voyage beset with disease and all the terrors of the sea, to conquer the Malaysian archipelago and all the indigenous therein. Ferd has by this point hardened into a rather ruthless commander, obsessed with the conquest and of course Christian conversion of these people, especially Raja Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), the defiant tribal leader on the island of Cebu, who’s been rallying his people to counter-attack these invaders.
The final shots of the film find a somehow still-alive Ferdinand moving among his slaughtered and dying men, the beach littered with Portuguese bodies along with the Malay dead, all in unforgiving shades of genocidal grey. The story of the famous explorer Magellan has been played out to its conclusion, and his myth told around the world is actually a PR campaign and a farce. Like the Templars before him, Ferd’s dubious mission to better the lives of the Malay people through Christianity conversion so that he might guilt-free take all their valuables is a story told repeatedly, much to the sorrow of the people that already live there.
Reviewed by Alicia Glass