Chile, 1901. On the border with Argentina, a vast archipelago, Tierra del Fuego, also called “The End of the World”, is offered as a concession to the Spanish businessman José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Every day, slaves work hard to nail together planks to enclose this immense territory – leaving their health, their dignity, and very often their lives, the foreman, Lieutenant MacLennan (Mark Stanley), not hesitating to finish anyone who slows down work because of their injuries.
Eager to establish a trade route to transport his cattle to the Atlantic, Menéndez appointed MacLennan to open the passage and eliminate the indigenous groups he would inevitably encounter on his way. The lieutenant chose Segundo, a Métis guide with extremely accurate shooting, as a witness. He is also introduced to the Texan mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall), who can “smell a native from miles away.”
With The settlersambitious and heartbreaking first feature film, Chilean-born director Felipe Gálvez Haberle sheds light on one of the most tragic episodes in the history of this South American country, that of the genocide of the Selk people ‘nam, now completely disappeared.
To tell this story, he first draws on the codes of the western, favoring, in the manner of John Ford, motionless wide shots of Andean landscapes as majestic as they are inhospitable, covered in a thick fog in which he progresses painfully and cautiously. the mismatched trio, whose members look at each other like earthenware dogs. Their alliance is nothing less than a catalyst for violence and hatred, which the filmmaker does not hesitate to reduce to its simplest expression in often unbearable scenes which demonstrate all the pettiness and perversity of the quest for power. and the conviction of one’s own superiority.
Behind the camera, Simone D’Arcangelo captures all the desolation of a place that even the sun cannot warm. By maintaining sobriety and mystery, the director of photography only reinforces the barbarity of the acts committed – as in this scene where the three protagonists decimate, hidden in the mist, a group of terrified and defenseless natives – slyly and cowardly.
While the sumptuousness of the landscapes, the blood-curdling sequences as well as the stupidity of a bourgeoisie ready to do anything to replenish the coffers alternate, Harry Allouche’s score, visibly inspired by compositions by Ennio Morricone, reinforces the anguish and the feeling of strangeness with rhythms of percussion and dissonant pizzicatos.
By reducing his protagonists to the role of beasts or victims, Felipe Gálvez Haberle takes time to establish the nuance necessary for his subject, or at least to reveal all its complexity. This choice, possibly strategic, nevertheless demonstrates the abysmal absurdity of the colonial enterprise and sacrosanct progress, and highlights the fictions which have allowed humanity to never face its own disaster.