“The Settlers” (Los Colonos) is Chile’s submission for best International Feature Film in the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. Given the slew of mostly documentaries chronicling the decimation of indigenous populations the colonization playbook is becoming well worn.
Colonize and destroy indigenous populations through violence, both cultural and physical then legitimization through treaties between the colonizers and the indigenous leaders. Then in some cases formal apologies and class action settlements by governments that continue the colonization in a more subtle but equally cruel fashion!
Chile opens the playbook again to offer a Chilean perspective to its colonization.
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago shared by Argentina and Chile. In “The Settlers” Don Josĕ or Mr. Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), as he more commonly is known as, is a sheep farmer with massive tracts of land in 1901 Tierra del Fuego. Sheep are so valuable they are referred to as “white gold”.
Indians have no value to Menéndez and is not beneath him to offer a bounty for Indian ears and uteruses. He has a vicious and brutal Scot Lieutenant MacLennan (Mark Stanley), also known as the Red Pig, working for him supervising building fences and then sends him with “half breed” Segundo (Camillo Arancibia) and American Bill (Benjamin Westfall) to find a transatlantic route for transporting his sheep but first he must “clean“ the area. Clean means eliminate the Indians that live within it which he undertakes with glee. And so they kill. They encounter a small Argentinian army unit mapping the Chilean-Argentinian border and a small group headed by a psychotic homosexual Scottish Colonel Martin (Sam Spruell). It is clear the colonizers and their hired help hate Indians considering them savages. The savages in “The Settlers” are certainly not the Indians.
The newly formed Chilean republican government some 7 years after the atrocities commissioned by Menéndez and carried out by McLennan wants to renew the agreement made by Menéndez and the Mapuche Indians and they want the “optics” on the treaty and treatment of Indians to look good. The Chilean government wants to build (at least theoretically and optically) a unified nation of settlers, Chileans and Indians.
The closing scene involving a film shoot of Segundo and his wife Rosa epitomizes the legitimization/public relations factor in colonization and the resistance it faces amongst Indians.
“The Settlers” makes its point exposing the brutality, hypocrisy, greed and underhanded manipulations of the colonizers. It could be that Chile has moved on from the shame of the downfall and execution of President Salvador Allende and is examining itself from an historical perspective long before Allende.
There is nothing terribly novel about the film as it follows the colonizer’s playbook but it is perfectly done. What scenery! Momentary lapses into spaghetti westerns.
Directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle.
You can see the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGW_tKtxrMc
RKS 2024 Film Rating: 86/100.
Set the Bar 