Felipe Gálvez Haberle's The Settlers is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023).
Weeks into Chile’s Constitutional Convention in August 2021, representative José Luis Vásquez Chogue made an emotional plea on behalf of the Selk’nam people, one of the last Indigenous communities to encounter with Western expansionism at the turn of the twentieth century, whereupon they were systematically murdered. “We always grew up in school hearing we were dead,” he attested, speaking in front of the elected body tasked with drafting a replacement for the nation’s Pinochet-era constitution. Amidst debates around the status of Chile’s many Indigenous groups, Vásquez Chogue recalled that his grandfather was among those held on Dawson Island internment camp in the Strait of Magellan. At the time of his speech, the Chilean government had yet to admit its role in such atrocities, and its constitution was the only one in Latin America not to recognize Indigenous people.
Less than two years after the convention, Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut feature, The Settlers, returns to the scene of the genocide. The setting is 1901 in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago of 48,000 square kilometers sitting at the farthest reaches of South America. Swallowed in Antarctic winds amidst the southernmost peaks of the Andes, this unmapped territory represented one of the last targets of colonial conquest on the continent, decades after Chile’s 1810 independence from Spain. Echoing the image of the classic “frontier,” Gálvez presents the audience with a sort of revisionist western, laying bare the crimes of the men who colonized Patagonia, and those of the Chilean state that backed them. In a blend of reality and fiction, the film imparts the true extent of the violence that built modern Chile.
The Settlers begins on the property of Don Jose Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), a white landowner and megarancher on the archipelago. Workers, most of whom are mestizo (half-white, half-Indigenous), construct a fence that stretches down the plains for miles, demarcating new land under Menéndez’s title. A few minutes in, a worker loses his hand in an accident. In the film’s first display of brute violence, Scottish foreman Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley) shoots and kills him. On Menéndez’s land, a dead worker is better than a useless one.
Menéndez orders MacLennan, a former British Army lieutenant, to find a path to the Atlantic for the rancher’s sheep. The dark implication of this mission is that the MacLennan must “clear” any original inhabitants along the way. MacLennan chooses mestizo laborer Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) to accompany him, after seeing his skilled marksmanship. They are joined by Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a Texan bounty hunter hired by Menéndez for his ability to “smell a native from a mile away.”
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023).
The bulk of the film follows the trio across the island. Wide-angle compositions amplify the scale of the landscape, exposing the men’s insignificance. Patagonia’s iconic mountains and forests are painted in vivid blues and reds, giving the setting an otherworldly feeling. This expansive framing can be contrasted with closer shots of Bill and MacLennan, revealed to be lonely, vulnerable figures who treat each encounter with another human as a test of masculinity. Segundo is stoic and silent, exacerbating the suspicion of Bill, who already refuses to trust a mestizo. Though the film is guided by their perspective, the two white men are far from sympathetic characters. Segundo, on the other hand, bears the ambivalence of the viewer—complicit in the violence yet horrified by the task.
As in a conventional American western, the men’s encounters with the island’s original inhabitants quickly become gruesome. Soon after leaving a Chilean army camp, they notice signs of a Selk’nam community in the distance. At dawn, they stalk the outskirts of the village, hiding under tall grass and a dense fog. While the villagers sleep, Bill and MacLennan launch their attack, shooting at every movement, every sign of life. But Segundo is paralyzed and fails to participate. He appears both frightened and appalled by the extended massacre in which he finds himself on the side of the perpetrator. He once aims his gun at Bill’s head before changing his mind and shooting into the sky.
The massacre continues into the night, when surrounded by the ravaged bodies of men, women, children, Bill and MacLennan take turns raping the lone survivor. Segundo, ordered to go last, is unable to proceed, and kills the dying woman instead. A mestizo removed from his land in Chiloé for the purpose of cheap labor, Segundo is both a victim and a perpetrator. The persistence of atrocity and the absence of justice make the film deeply unsettling, at times unbearably so.
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023).
The official archive of interviews, photographs, and reports from the era—mostly from judicial inquiries into the killings of the Selk’nam—provides the historical material for the film. These investigations never challenged the impunity of those behind the massacres; instead, they justified the forced relocation of Selk’nam survivors to internment camps. While the plot is a dramatic fictionalization of real events, several characters are based on real-life figures. The Menéndez family arrived in Chile in 1868 and later received thousands of hectares of free land from the state in order to promote “economic development” in the southern territories. Jose Menéndez’s agricultural empire extended over half a million acres, earning him the title of “King of Patagonia.” MacLennan, who worked for Menéndez during this period, continues to be infamous in the region for his slaughters. Segundo, too, is based on a Chilote worker at the Menéndez property who appears in the judicial reports.
The film’s massacre scene plays with the generic conventions of the western. Depicting an early encounter with an Indigenous group through the eyes of white cowboy-like figures, Gálvez makes the ethical dimensions clear. His framing can be contrasted with Miguel Littin’s Tierra del fuego (2000), which shares a setting and a subject with The Settlers. Littin’s film is a relatively early depiction of Indigenous people in Chilean fictional cinema, which, apart from a few exceptions, only began to portray Indigenous characters in the 1990s (previous representations of Indigenous communities were largely limited to documentaries). Following the Romanian engineer Julius Popper’s conquests of the Selk’nam people, Tierra del fuego shows the expansionists committing a massacre in response to a Selk’nam attack. The “civilized” white protagonists battle the caricatured, “savage” natives, who, as María Paz Peirano notes, are “not represented as a subject, but rather as an exotic curiosity.”
Of course, The Settlers also presents the white man’s perspective, along with that of Segundo’s, who occupies a morally complex in-between. Extraordinary shots of vast landscapes, battle music, and chapters with red-splashed titles like “Half Blood,” “The Ends of the Earth,” and “The Red Pig,” call to mind the over-the-top conventions typical to the American western and its typical heroic fantasies. The Selk’nam people are given almost no agency; they are nameless victims shown in the brief moments before they are massacred. But unlike Tierra del fuego, which explores the social worlds and romantic exploits of the expansionists, Gálvez strips down his plot, narrowing in on their psyche and brutality. These choices allow him to flip the politics of the western against the characters who would conventionally be its heroes, foregrounding the centrality of violence and masculinity both in the genre and in the historical event his film depicts. Gálvez ultimately subverts the visuals of the heroic western in a dramatic, fictional plot that brazenly omits a hero. But given that these events are based on documented histories, the viewer is forced to reckon with the fact that the depravity on screen, though couched in the optics of the mythic frontier, is far from a fiction.
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023).
The Settlers also draws on a legacy of politically charged westerns from Latin America, many of which recall folkloric tales of vigilante violence against white settlers. Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) is a prime example: it follows an assassin in the Brazilian hinterlands who takes the place of the revolutionary peasant leader he is hired to kill. The last in Rocha’s 1960s trilogy, the film uses the western genre to portray the violence of Brazilian class domination. Still, reversing the western has its limits, especially in a film like The Settlers which, while challenging the erasure of Indigenous communities, nonetheless perpetuates the colonial vision of Indigenous silence, otherness, and extinction. As Stanley Corkin warns in his 2004 book Cowboys as Cold Warriors: “By employing the Western as a vehicle for critical social ideas, writers and directors allowed their films to be readily recontained by dominant conservative ideologies.”
Gálvez’s departures from certain clichés of the conventional western help The Settlers avoid these pitfalls. The film lacks a clear resolution to the conquest plot, refusing the triumph of the cowboys. Segundo, and not one of the white men, is portrayed as the film’s most sympathetic character, a result of his extreme discomfort and relative powerlessness. Gálvez nonetheless retains and even exaggerates the generic convention of violence, which serves a truth-telling function. He states in a recent interview: “To tell this hushed-up story without portraying the brutality and violence of the events would have been unpardonable, an unacceptable compromise with regard to both history and the victims.”
The Settlers raises the question: how do we depict the true scale of atrocity when it is impossible to summarize such terrors in statistics and historical footnotes? How can we reckon with these injustices—or even meet demands for a faithful investigation—when the extent of the violence has been erased, sanitized, and rewritten for over a century? By working with a flawed archive, the film exemplifies what scholar Carolina Urrutia Neno calls an “excess of the real,” by which filmmakers combine archival and documentary elements toward a historical critique. The generic tropes of the western—its never-ending landscapes and gruesome battle scenes—are well-suited to display this “excess.” In the past decade, as Iván Pinto and Urritia Neno note, Chilean filmmakers have increasingly turned to fictional narratives to amplify the nation’s abuses.
The film’s final scenes dwell on the erasures inherent to the state documentation process, making the case for Gálvez’s fictional revisionism. In an abrupt shift from the wilderness, the film moves seven years ahead to the well-adorned halls of the Menéndez mansion in Punta Arenas, just north of Tierra del Fuego. Judge Waldo Seguel is sent by the state to conduct the first official inquiry into the killings of Selk’nam people, a mission rejected by Menéndez’s descendants, who remind Seguel (also based on a real-life figure) that their efforts to “clean” the land ultimately extended the sovereignty of the Chilean state. The ending scene shows Segundo and his wife, now settled in a secluded island in Chiloé, forced by a state official to perform in a staged film reel, a clear critique of the image-making behind the progressive nation that erases Indigenous identities and histories. Such images still form the basis of the archive referenced by official bodies, historians, activists, and Selk’nam descendants today.
The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023).
There are risks in reimagining the violences of the past. Paz Peirano notes that Chilean cinema tends to “fix” the images of the Indigenous in “the universe of ancestors.” She writes, “There is a kind of imaginary freezing of the indigenous at the moment in which they are present as active subjects of collective memory.” But by abandoning the frontier in the final scenes, The Settlers rejects this tendency, refusing to confine its politics to the early twentieth century. Gálvez’s decision to portray violence from the perspective of the colonizer is geared towards a contemporary non-Indigenous audience, one which has more in common with the perpetrator than the victim. The film then elicits disturbing questions around the spectator’s complicity in colonial violence both then and now, in Chile and around the world.
The question of national memory—and memorializing—is crucial to understanding Chile’s contemporary divides. In September 2022, a year after Vásquez Chogue’s emotional speech, Chilean voters resoundingly rejected the Constitutional Convention’s progressive proposal. A poll conducted days after the referendum showed “plurinationalism and Indigenous autonomy” as the second most cited reason for rejection. As scholar Kelly Bauer commented in the aftermath, “Opposition to indigenous rights, as ‘clashes’ with Indigenous Mapuche communities rage in the south, in many ways drove the right-wing reaction.” More than just offering a reflection on a dark history, Gálvez explicitly intervenes in the current political moment, revisiting the nation’s greatest crimes to counter the right-wing political movement that, in the weeks ahead of the constitutional vote, framed equal rights for Indigenous groups as unearned privileges.
While drawing on the archive and the genre-bending legacies of Latin American filmmakers, Gálvez also builds on the work of Indigenous activists and leaders, who in the span of two decades managed to elevate the Selk’nam genocide from a little-known detail of Chile’s independent history to a subject of national concern. In settings far removed from the cinema halls of Cannes (where The Settlers premiered last year), activists have pursued autonomous forms of memorial through public protest. In October 2019, after the nation erupted into a mass uprising against long-standing neoliberal policies and rising inequality, protesters in Punta Arenas tore down a bust of Jose Menéndez located in one of the city’s central plazas. By December 2019, a wooden sculpture depicting a Selk’nam elder had been erected in Plaza Baquedano, Santiago, the epicenter of the uprising’s monthslong urban occupation. Though the trials of state recognition and reparation have faltered time and time again, these efforts have shown that popular memory persists.