While American cinema has now begun to slowly (although not necessarily surely) reckon with the legacy of colonialism and white supremacy, Latin American cinema has long decried its brutal legacy. This is especially true towards its indigenous communities and as far back as 1969 when Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés and his Utamau collective told the story of the undisclosed sterilization of Andean Indian women by an American Peace Corps clinic in Blood of the Condor and as recently as Lisando Alonso’s 1994 Jauja and Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017). We can now add Chilean director Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s striking feature debut The Settlers (Los colonos) to that list.
One of three critically acclaimed Latin American films of 2023 to screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center in the next month (the other two are Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts and Lila Avilés’ Tótem), and Chile’s selection for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, The Settlers takes place in 1901, at the southernmost tip of the American continent, Tierra del Fuego. It's a vast, cold, no man’s land whose boundaries are being disputed by Argentina and Chile, a land where a man is shot dead for losing his arm in a work-related accident. Where white men (for this is a man’s world; we never see a woman until the film’s very end) openly display their disdain for this land’s native inhabitants.
Landowner José Menéndez (a real historical character played by the always magnificent and chilling Alfredo Castro) orders right-hand man Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a Scottish ex-soldier, to go on a quest to find a direct route to the Atlantic for his sheep-herding empire. He also gives him carte blanche to eliminate any obstacles on the way; in other words, the island’s native Selk’nam people. Alexander chooses Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a half-white, half-indigenous, rather taciturn man from the Chiloé Island as his companion for his sharpshooting skills. Menéndez adds a third: Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a racist Texan he recruited in Mexico who has a penchant for collecting the ears of those indigenous men, women and children he slaughters. The set-up unavoidably recalls John Ford’s The Searchers, but The Settlers’ heart is far more Conradian than Fordian. As the three ride their horses in search of that route, they are dwarfed by this vast, sometimes arid landscape, framed by snowy mountain caps; nature is indifferent to their quest and the cruelty they will inflict on those who live there…and on each other.
The trio first run into a small group of Argentine soldiers protecting a surveyor (Mariano Llinás, who contributed to the film’s script and co-wrote Argentina, 1985) who is drawing the border lines that will separate the Argentinean portion of Tierra del Fuego from Chile’s. “Nothing good happens when the military gets bored,” one of the soldiers says and soon MacLennan is seen boxing with one of the Argentinean soldiers in the first of several violent bouts of wrestling that is a physical representation of the fight between both countries over the same land. The geologist may present himself later that evening, as the men share a bottle, as a rational representative of civilization, the first of many who will, through their intellect, tame these lands, but he is no different than these soldiers as he takes his indigenous, underaged male assistant to his tent.
A plume of smoke leads the trio to a small community of indigenous people whom they promptly slaughter. The extermination is mostly kept off-screen: Gálvez Haberle only shows these fog-enshrouded men point their rifles, the orange blast of their barrels breaking open the fog followed by their victims’ screams. In their final stop in their journey they run into a camp of renegade British soldiers led by the cold Colonel Martin (Sam Spruell) who has no compunction in leading his men into all sorts of debauchery among themselves and with the mostly indigenous women they have captured in their exploits.
Then, in the final 30 minutes, The Settlers takes a sharp turn as it jumps forward seven years to Punta Arenas as it follows a brand new character, Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso), who has been sent by the Chilean government to investigate the atrocities committed by Menéndez. From the vast exteriors we now move into luxurious interiors: the fruits of genocide. Menéndez and his daughter coldly defend their actions; their justifications are no different than William Hale’s in destroying an entire community in Killers of the Flower Moon. In fact, as the film ends, you can’t help but feel that The Settlers, in foregrounding the brutality of these Spanish and British conquistadors, is unwittingly engaging in a conversation with Scorsese’s film, especially towards the end, as Vicuña tries to pose Segundo and his wife for a photograph, drinking tea, that will accompany his report. Not only have their lands been colonized and their people exterminated by these white settlers; they now want to tell their story from their perspective.
From Harry Allouche’s percussive, spaghetti-western like score to those beautiful panoramic shots captured by Simone D’Arcengelo’s camera, Gálves Haberle taps into and subverts the Western’s iconography and tropes to lay bare the legacy of blood left behind by these European settlers and his country’s need to reckon with its own violent past. Chilean cinema has, since the end of Pinochet’s regime, tried to come to terms with that brutal dictatorship’s legacy. The Settlers asks Chileans, and us, to go back, way back, in our respective histories if we want to understand our dark, longstanding tradition of colonial violence and the monumental stories created to hide it.
The Settlers opens exclusively at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday, January 19.
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