El viaje más largo

Story of one of the most incredible adventures ever happened: the first trip around the world. It was realized to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the most incredible journey by sea ever made. A nice and spectacular documentary , this ¨El viaje más largo (2020)¨ or ¨The Longest Journey¨ mixes animation, interviews with experts , prestigious historians, and images at the time by taking a look at humanity's journey into the unknown, focusing on two different eras with a common human and technological challenge.

El viaje más largo (2020) is an enjoyable and attractive documentary that presents us a lot of biographic elements about Fernando de Magallanes and Juan Sebastián Elcano . Focusing on the deeds of the Portuguese Magellan and the Spanish Elcano between 1519 and 1522, when the former commanded a flotilla of ships armed by the Crown of Spain in search of an alternative way to the Asian land route , passing the Magellan strait , arriving to Guam , Marianas islands , to reach the Moluccas Islands and establish a maritime trade route bordering America to the south, and the second, Elcano, completed the feat after the death of the Portuguese in what are now the Philippine Islands, in the island of Cebú while he combated rebel natives . Secondly, but obviously associated with the first, the film shows the analogies between that first circumnavigation trip around the world with the space race and, specifically, with the arrival of the first man on the Moon in 1969, concluding that space is the new ocean that the human being tends to explore, something that is in the very essence of homo sapiens, the curiosity to find new lands, new spaces, new frontiers, physical or intellectual.

Produced by La Claqueta, and Dibulitoon Studio that also made the cartoon movie ¨Elcano y Magallanes. La primera vuelta al mundo (2019)¨. This documentary was well made by Manuel H. Martín (Huelva, 1980) who takes up the formula he used in 30 Years of Darkness . He is an Andalusian director and producer who already has an appreciable career in cinema. To him is due, for example, the intertwined animated documentary 30 years of darkness (2012), about the so-called "moles" of the Civil War (men who remained locked up for decades, in order to escape the summary justice of Francoism), very appreciated and awarded, which turned out to be the germ of The Infinite Trench (2019) or La Trinchera Infinita , the brand new Basque-Andalusian film nominated this year for the Oscar on behalf of Spain.

Adding more historical remarks to those depicted on the movie , these are the following ones : Magallanes was a Portuguese explorer and a subject of the Hispanic Monarchy from 1518. He is best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage bearing thereafter his name and achieved the first European navigation from the Atlantic to Asia. During this voyage, Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in 1521 in the present-day Philippines, after running into resistance by the indigenous population led by Lapulapu, who consequently became a Philippines national symbol of resistance to colonialism. After Magellan's death, Juan Sebastián Elcano took the lead of the expedition, and with its few other surviving members, in one of the two remaining ships, completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth when they returned to Spain in 1522. Born 4 February 1480 into a family of minor Portuguese nobility, Magellan became a skilled sailor and naval officer in service of the Portuguese Crown in Asia. King Manuel I of Portugal refused to support Magellan's plan to reach the Maluku Islands (the "Spice Islands") by sailing westwards around the American continent. Facing some criminal offences, Magellan left Portugal and proposed the same expedition to King Charles I of Spain, who accepted it. Consequently, many in Portugal considered him a traitor and he never returned. In Seville, he married, fathered two children, and organised the expedition. Granted special powers and privileges by the King, he led the Armada from Sanlucar de Barrameda, southwest across the Atlantic Ocean, to the eastern coast of South America, and down to Patagonia. Despite a series of storms and mutinies, the expedition successfully passed through the Strait of Magellan into the Mar del Sur, which Magellan renamed the "Peaceful Sea" . The expedition reached Guam and, shortly after, the Philippine islands. There Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in April 1521. Under the command of captain Juan Sebastian Elcano, the expedition later reached the Spice Islands. To navigate back to Spain and avoid seizure by the Portuguese, the expedition's two remaining ships split, one attempting, unsuccessfully, to reach New Spain by sailing eastwards across the Pacific, while the other, commanded by Elcano, sailed westwards via the Indian Ocean and up the Atlantic coast of Africa, finally arriving at the expedition's port of departure and thereby completing the first complete circuit of the globe. While in the Kingdom of Portugal's service, Magellan had already reached the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia on previous voyages traveling east (from 1505 to 1511-1512). By visiting this area again but now traveling west, Magellan achieved a nearly complete personal circumnavigation of the globe for the first time in history.