ROTARY CLUB OF MANILA JOURNALISM AWARDS
2006 National Newspaper of the Year 2011 National Newspaper of the Year 2013 Business Newspaper of the Year 2017 Business Newspaper of the Year 2019 Business Newspaper of the Year 2021 Pro Patria Award PHILIPPINE STATISTICS AUTHORITY 2018 Data Champion
BusinessMirror A broader look at today’s business
EJAP JOURNALISM AWARDS
BUSINESS NEWS SOURCE OF THE YEAR
(2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
2018 BANTOG MEDIA AWARDS
HISTORY IN FRACTURE: www.businessmirror.com.ph
n
Sunday, September 14, 2025 Vol. 20 No. 336
P25.00 nationwide | 2 sections 12 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK
LAV DIAZ ON MAGELLAN P
By Troi Santos
EOPLE should watch the movie first. That was the quiet challenge Lav Diaz carried back from Toronto, where Magellan had just screened.
LAV DIAZ in Queens, New York, September 10, 2025. With Magellan now the Philippines’ Oscar entry, Diaz keeps the challenge simple: “People should watch the movie first—the questions come after.” TROI SANTOS
ON ‘MAGELLAN’ AS PHL ENTRY TO OSCARS:
PORTRAIT of Ferdinand Magellan at the Naval Museum of Madrid. For filmmaker Lav Diaz, the figure of Magellan is not just history but a fracture of memory—an entry point to the wounds of colonization. His new film Magellan, the Philippines’ Oscar entry, reframes the conquistador and those he encountered. WHPICS | DREAMSTIME.COM
I welcomed him back after almost 14 months away, time he had spent filming the project that almost took his life. Seeing him again in New York felt like closing a loop, returning from exile, bringing with him reels of cinema and the fatigue of survival. He looked exactly as he always does, black shirt, black pants, black shoes, with a black hat and a pair of bargain-bin glasses from Manila. The lenses were so cheap he said they fogged up whenever the weather shifted, forcing him at times to stop filming altogether because he could not see. The image was almost comical, an acclaimed auteur blinded by his own thrift, yet it suited him. His cinema has always come from endurance rather than luxury, clarity hard-won through fog. Even the sweeping Magellan, with its patient grandeur and painterly frames, had been shot on a modest Lumix G7, far from the Panavision rigs many assume. We began, as we often do, not with theory but with food. He asked for his usual vegetarian Chinese dishes, a nod to his lifelong preference, and later we sat at a diner along Northern Boulevard. With coffee in hand, the conversation unfolded in slow stretches, broken by pauses and bursts, much like the cadence of his film.
Lapu-lapu, Humabon
HE reflected on the reception of Magellan. Historian Ambeth Oc-
ampo had given him supportive feedback, but the wider public seemed to circle around the wrong things. Much of the conversation fixated on his portrayal of LapuLapu, whom he had reframed not as the immortal warrior carved into Philippine legend but as an older, diminished leader, stripped of myth and made mortal. Audiences latched onto that provocation, but he considered the real silence elsewhere. For him, the deeper fracture of history was Magellan’s order to discard the sacred anitos, an act that forced the rejection of indigenous icons and beliefs. That spiritual erasure, he believed, marked the beginning of colonization long before the first encomienda decree or battle of conquest. From there, his attention turned to Rajah Humabon. History has often cast Humabon as traitor or collaborator, but Diaz emphasized another angle, that after Magellan’s death, Humabon invited the remaining Spaniards to a feast, only to massacre them at their most vulnerable. In his reading, Humabon, not Lapu-Lapu, could just as easily be remembered as the first Filipino hero, a figure who outwitted invaders when they least expected it. The point was not to replace one idol with another, but to fracture the rigidity of memory and show how messy resistance and betrayal could be when lived in real time.
‘Our stories resonate across cultures’
S
EN. Loren Legarda expressed her deep pride as the film Magellan, directed by Lav Diaz, was officially selected as the Philippines’ entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. “As a firm believer in the power of the creative industries to ignite our national consciousness, I am filled with pride to see Magellan represent the Philippines on the world stage, first in Cannes, and now in the Oscars,” said Legarda. “The film’s selection for the 98th Academy Awards highlights the talents of Filipino artists to the world and underscores the significance of our stories as they resonate across cultures through Director Lav Diaz’s distinctive artistic interpretation of our pivotal past,” Legarda added. Premiering at the Cannes “OUR stories, when told with conviction, can move hearts across the globe and Film Festival to international recogilluminate the Filipino spirit for all to nition, Magellan unflinchingly revissee.”— Sen. Loren Legarda ROY DOMINGO its the complex story of Ferdinand Magellan through a uniquely Filipino lens. The film, directed by internationally acclaimed director Lav Diaz and starring Gael Garcia Bernal, has drawn praise for its fearless engagement with long-held historical narratives, uncompromising artistry, and riveting performances. “By revisiting our history with discernment and integrity, Magellan inspires every Filipino to think critically, engage openly, and take pride in our roots. Our stories, when told with conviction, can move hearts across the globe and illuminate the Filipino spirit for all to see,” Legarda said. The four-term senator, a patron of arts and culture who has championed legislation in support of national heritage and the arts, also serves as one of the executive producers of Magellan, alongside Director Paul Soriano. “Achievements like this remind us why we must continue to invest in culture, education, and the creative industries. Magellan sets a new standard for international recognition and should inspire generations of Filipino storytellers to follow their passion and pursue excellence. My heartfelt congratulations to the entire team, especially to Director Lav Diaz, Producer Paul Soriano, the lead actor Gael Garcia Bernal, and everyone behind this inspiring work,” Legarda concluded.
He widened the frame to the larger shadow left behind. What began with Magellan’s demands and Humabon’s betrayal soon hardened into the encomienda system, the machinery of forced tribute and labor that turned the islands into a colony of extraction. To him, this was not dead history, but a lingering condition, a wound that still runs through the veins of the nation. Filipinos, he believed, continue to live with the memory of dispossession even if the language of it has faded.
The early years
OVER coffee, he drifted into memory. Before film, he had been a journalist who loved words and a guitarist who loved rhythm. Those instincts converged in cinema, where precision of language and cadence of sound met endurance of image. In his early years, he saved money simply to buy film stock, one roll at a time, while already shouldering the responsibilities of adulthood. Nothing about it was glamorous, it was survival. Later, in Queens, New York, he shaped his cinematic voice in cramped apartments and borrowed editing rooms, as he pieced together reels that stretched across ten or eleven hours. Queens, he often said, taught him patience. It gave him the capacity to endure. That endurance would be tested in ways he never expected. During the making of Magellan, Diaz contracted tuberculosis. At first, he thought he would not finish the film. His body was failing, his lungs heavy, his energy scattered into fragments. Shooting days were interrupted not by artistic pause but by sheer physical collapse. He described feeling as though the very breath needed to animate his actors and his camera was being stolen from him.
For weeks, he thought he could not finish the project. But then he reminded himself that there were people relying on him, colleagues, assistants, actors, and crew members who tied their livelihoods to his persistence. To stop would mean not just his own surrender, but the unraveling of a fragile community bound together by the promise of the film.
Colonial weight in films
IT struck me as a mirror of the themes in his work. His body, frail and failing, became a living metaphor for the colonial weight his films expose, history pressing down like illness, threatening to extinguish voice and vision. And yet, as in his cinema, survival depended on endurance. He mustered what strength he could, carrying not just his own ambition but the sustenance of others. The illness that almost silenced him became another layer in the story of Magellan, the private battle beneath the public epic. The film that questions survival in history became itself a survival film in the making. His career has always carried that duality of solitude and solidarity. Serafin Geronimo: Ang Kriminal ng Barrio Concepcion in 1999, Batang West Side in 2001, Evolution of a Filipino Family in 2004, Death in the Land of Encantos in 2007, Norte, the End of History in 2013, From What Is Before in 2014. Each of these films asked audiences not for entertainment but for endurance. Recognition followed: the Golden Leopard at Locarno, the Silver Bear at Berlin for A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, the Golden Lion at Venice for The Woman Who Left. Even his sung-through allegory Season of the Devil in 2018 continued his conviction that cinema must provoke rather than soothe. Continued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 57.1740 n JAPAN 0.3884 n UK 77.6309 n HK 7.3409 n CHINA 8.0319 n SINGAPORE 44.6253 n AUSTRALIA 38.0722 n EU 67.0937 n KOREA 0.0411 n SAUDI ARABIA 15.2403 Source: BSP (September 12, 2025)