This western from Chile confronts the erased genocide of Indigenous people 

Fact and fiction seamlessly converge in Chilean director Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s imposing first feature, “The Settlers” (“Los colonos”), a revisionist western that questions the tropes of this quintessentially American genre and in turn shines a light on a hidden genocide.

Set in 1901 in the inhospitable terrain of South America’s Tierra del Fuego, the gruesome saga, which represented Chile at the Oscars this awards season in the best international feature film category, follows a trio of men from distinct backgrounds tasked with murdering as many Selk’nam Indigenous people as they find to clear the land for cattle.

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The killing squad includes Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a mixed-raced Chilean man who is half-Mapuche and half-white; English lieutenant Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley); and a ruthless American cowboy simply named Bill (Benjamin Westfall). The first two were based on real people — MacLennan was a foreman for José Menéndez, the powerful Chilean landowner who ordered the murderous expedition—while Bill represents the men that the Menéndez family, which remains wealthy today, brought in from abroad to work for them.

“I didn’t try to make a film to speak for Indigenous people, but rather to take a critical stance about the colonization processes from the point of view of the white world or the world of mixed-race people, to talk about how history is written, how it can be rewritten and what role cinema occupies,” Gálvez Haberle said in Spanish during a recent interview.

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Gálvez Haberle believes that the history of cinema is also stained with blood in terms of what has been depicted, by who, and how it appears on screen. “The Settlers” is his searing attempt at using cinema itself to course-correct previously uncritical visions of history.

We spoke to the director ahead of the film’s Friday opening in Los Angeles. The following interview has been translated and lightly edited for length and clarity.

(MUBI)

What was it about this period, the early 20th century in Chile, that you found particularly compelling to set your western in it?

What interested me was a photo of men posing with the bodies of the Selk’nam Indigenous people they have hunted, which I saw online in an independent Chilean publication. There were photos of this hidden genocide in Tierra del Fuego. That image was what captivated me. It urged me to go investigate that page of Chile’s history that had been erased. In Chile there are several pages that have been erased from history, but I was interested in going to a foundational one, one from the beginning of the century, to create a reflection about what happens when stories are deleted. Photos like this one began to circulate on the internet about 15 years ago.

Tell me about Segundo and the particular role he plays in the film as someone of mixed-race involved in the extermination of the Selk’nam Indigenous people.

Segundo was based on a real person from the judicial cases of people who participated in the slaughter. His name was Segundo Molina, and he was from Chiloé. The Chilotes were the cheap labor of Tierra del Fuego, and it seemed interesting to me to include a Chilean mestizo or mixed-race person.

He is in between two worlds, the old world that MacLennan represents and the new world that Bill represents. I thought a lot about this idea of the mentor. There are two mentors here. Segundo is a character who is between two paths. The white characters have similarities to the father he never met. His white father probably did similar things. Segundo’s birth is not the product of a love story.

Segundo is conflicted about what he is doing, but we have to understand that the Indigenous nations also fought among themselves. He is not killing his people; he is killing people from another Indigenous nation. And yet, he still feels like he’s betraying himself.

What remains of the Selk’nam culture today? Are there efforts in Chile to acknowledge what happened to them?

The language practically disappeared. What remains are mestizo or mixed-race descendants of the Selk’nam, but as a people, they were completely murdered. In Chile, the state finally recognized that this was a genocide only four months ago. And only two months ago, the Chilean government recognized that there are descendants of the Selk’nam people. Two months prior to this recognition, they were declared extinct. Back then many were sent to islands where there were congregations of priests and they died there; others died in massacres. Those who survived did so because they left the island.

Is the genocide of the Selk’nam people a difficult subject to discuss in Chile today?

It’s a taboo subject, but over the last seven years or so it has been further explored. Something that the film tries to express hinges on that common phrase that says history is written by the victors. I would also say that history is written by the ones who hold the camera. Filmmakers are sometimes also complicit in the erasure of certain things. For me, a key moment in the film is when the Selk’nam figure painted in red, which is part of one of their initiation rituals known as Hain, appears in the forest.

That figure is very popular in Chile. It’s used as the logo for a skateboarding brand, on wine bottles, and you can see magnets of that figure at the airport. What I always question and what also pushed me to make the film, is how the Selk’nam people, and that image in particular, have been commodified into a Chilean souvenir, without first analyzing that a genocide was committed. The reflection of the film is to show what happens when we erase history. In Chile this topic is not part of the official history, it is not taught in schools, only people who are interested in the topic know about it.

One can make a case to say American westerns were propaganda that often made a spectacle of murdering Indigenous people. Did this influence how you depicted violence in your film?

I started researching the film by watching westerns and began to understand the western is propaganda justifying the idea of development. It was interesting to me to use all the rules of the western genre to question it. It always surprises me when people say my film is very violent or explicit, since there are a lot of westerns about the massacres of Indigenous people. However, there is a view that there is more violence in “The Settlers” than in many other westerns.

(MUBI)

Perhaps there’s a certain effectiveness when it comes to showing violence in my film. I was an editor for 15 years before doing this, and I’d like to think that “The Settlers” is written with some scenes that may have been written in those scripts for westerns back then and that the studios at that time wouldn’t allow in their movies. In that sense, it’s like my movie is made from deleted scenes or scraps from other films, from scenes that did not make it into those other westerns, but that were surely part of those stories, such as rape, sex between men or the mutilation of body parts.

We are now having important discussions on colonization in Latin America, but we always focus on the initial arrival of the Spaniards many centuries ago and not on the colonization that continued to happen once sovereign nations were established.

(MUBI)

The story they tell us in Latin America is that when the Spanish arrived, they killed the Indigenous peoples, and then the people of Latin America fought for independence. That’s the linear and official take we learn. But in reality, in Latin America we live in ambiguity. We recognize ourselves collectively as victims of colonization, but we never tell the story of when we were the colonizers. I was interested in telling the story of when these things happened under the Chilean state or the Argentine state, when the Indigenous people were still killed and colonized under these new independent countries across Latin America.

That violence continues to occur today in the way that Indigenous peoples are still discriminated against in numerous countries or do not have an equal voice before the law.

For example, when the new Chilean constitution that was rejected a year ago was being drafted, one of the reasons why it was rejected was precisely that it was going to recognize Indigenous peoples and to declare Chile a multinational state. That generated the most rejection and that resonates with my film in terms of the violence that still exists against these groups. The first act of “The Settlers” is about physical violence, then in the second act there’s verbal violence. We heard language that is extremely violent. And then the film deals with systematic violence as the perpetrators think about how they will hide their actions. Curiously, many people say that the final scene is the most violent and perhaps it is because it is the one closest to our present. That kind of violence against Indigenous people or those with Indigenous features could be happening at a police station three blocks from my house or yours today. And that’s a universal problem.

Can cinema help bring back the erased pages of history or at least question the repercussions of ignoring the past?

It’s normal for cinema to try to talk about the deleted pages of history. That’s why there are movies like Scorsese’s latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The biggest comparison between that film and mine is the idea of working on these unspoken topics. There’s a type of cinema interested in looking at chapters in history or subjects that have been explored on multiple occasions, but now putting the camera in another place or from the point of view of a new character. You can tell the same story over and over, but as you change the point of view, these previously erased perspectives begin to emerge.