Camilo Arancibia, Mark Stanley, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s ambitious, incendiary feature debut – a masterful revisionist Western – confronts a savage period in Chilean history.
1901, the start of a new century: Wealthy landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) sends three men – a British army captain (Mark Stanley), an American mercenary (Benjamin Westfall) and a young Mestizo tracker (Camilo Arancibia) to secure a trade route from his ranches to the Atlantic Ocean. His chosen pathway runs through the ancestral lands of Chile’s indigenous Selk’nam people, but Menéndez has given his men considerable leeway on how his ends should be achieved.
An unflinching watch, with scenes of violence and sexual assault, The Settlers sees Haberle probe the unsettling relationship between myth, truth and history, melding Western and thriller tropes to explore a horrifying episode of colonial brutality that is still not widely acknowledged in Chile’s history. An exceptionally well crafted film, it features a striking score from Henry Allouche and gorgeous, appropriately haunting visuals from cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo.
