After ghost projects, ghost hero is next

After ghost projects, ghost hero is next | Daily Tribune

Magellan is set to start screening in Philippine theaters nationwide on 10 September. If Pinoys flock to the movie houses for the film that enjoyed a five-minute standing ovation at the unquestionably prestigious Cannes International Film Festival in May this year, they could get shocked and disgusted that the Diaz film practically asserts that our so-called “first national hero,” Lapulapu, did not exist at all. (The historic name should not be hyphenated, as ruled by an executive order of President Rodrigo Duterte in 2021 December. The original name is reportedly “Silapulapu” with “Si” affixed to the name as a term of respect for the stature of the name’s owner.)

The film reportedly shows that the men who killed the leader of the invading fleet from Spain were under a chieftain named Lapulapu but he was not with the bunch that succeeded in killing the chief voyager who was a Portuguese working for the Spanish monarch (Philip II) because the King of Portugal did not want to fund the search for Moluccas Island in Asia famous for its spices.

Diaz’s claim as a research-supported filmmaker is that Rajah Humabon invented the existence of a brave and fierce Lapulapu who did not want to pay tribute to the King of Spain, represented by Magellan. Humabon wanted to enrage, as well as invade, Lapulapu’s territory.

Diaz asserted in media interviews in April and May this year that although Humabon had allowed himself and his wife to be baptized by the priests in Magellan’s expedition, Humabon had a change of heart and wanted the Spaniards to leave the islands. Humabon wanted Magellan dead.

Humabon knew that once their leader was gone, Magellan’s fleet would sail away. (The surviving fleet did leave Philippine shores. Eventually, the Spaniards must have sensed that the archipelago of disunited islands they had chanced upon was easy prey, prompting King Philip to send forces to the island in several waves after Magellan’s death. And that’s how Spain came to rule us for 300 years!)

The Pinoys’ disgust for the film’s “revelation” that claims Lapulapu did not exist did not materialize simply because only a few Filipinos have watched the Diaz film since it was completed in 2024.

The film is produced by funds from at least three countries (including the Philippines, of course) and was first shown in international film festivals, where it was well-received.

Thus, it was the foreign critics and reviewers invited to those festivals who first became aware of the film’s “revelation” that there was never a Lapulapu chieftain in an island in the archipelago, which would eventually be known as Las Islas Filipinas, or the Philippine Islands in English.

Our country was named after King Philip, who reportedly became syphilitic later in life. It reportedly drove his wife, Juana, into near insanity. Foreign critics who are familiar with Philippine history questioned Diaz’s claim, thus pushing Diaz to announce that he spent seven years doing research in libraries and archives in various countries to find documents from historians and chroniclers who had met Lapulapu at one time or another in the 16th century, the era of Spanish conquest of the Malay islands in the South Pacific Ocean.

There are online reports that the Philippine government has not bothered to question Diaz’s claim since the film is an artistic account considered to be fictional.

Our government still considers Lapulapu the country’s first hero, whatever Diaz says. In fact, in May this year, when Diaz’s film had begun to receive international acclaim, the country’s National Historical Commission moved the Lapulapu Monument from Agrifina Circle in Rizal Park to Maria Orosa St., where the monument is more conspicuous. The monument is known as The Sentinel of Freedom.

According to Diaz, no international historian or chronicler had ever met in person the supposed chieftain Lapulapu. Not even the Magellan expedition chronicler, Antonio Pigaffeta.

The chronicler wrote about Lapulapu based on the accounts of the soldiers of Magellan who saw him killed by native soldiers with their arrows and bolos. In April and May this year, Diaz had rounds of interviews with foreign journos in which he defended his cinematic stance that Lapulapu was only a name and entity invented by Humabon.

The Film Academy of the Philippines’ submitting to the Oscars’ Magellan for consideration in the Best International Features may be questioned, too, by certain quarters since its lead actor is not a Filipino but Mexican: Gael Garcia Bernal, who portrays Magellan.