by ED RAMPELL
Just as the Israeli settler state is engaged in fierce warfare with Palestine’s Native people, director/co-writer Felipe Gálvez’s has produced a timely film called The Settlers, which offers an unsettling look at the colonization of Tierra del Fuego in Chile circa 1900.
The film features a British soldier Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), an American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall), who had been a cowboy in Texas and fought Comanches, and a mixed-race mestizo scout Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) that is Mapuche on his mother’s side and Spanish on his father’s, who are dispatched by Chilean landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) to survey his huge land holdings, establish the property’s boundaries and chart a course through Patagonia to the Pacific Ocean.
From the outset, this colonial endeavor is marked by extraordinary brutality and bloodshed—mercenaries slice ears off Natives as proof for collecting bounties—that may resonate with contemporary viewers as the vicious mayhem in Israel and the Occupied Territories unfolds.
The Settlers dramatizes “the genocide of the Selk’nam people, who the whites in our country refer to as the Ona…Their [MacLennan’s, Bill’s and Segundo’s] mission is clearly to kill the Natives. It was part of the territory’s ‘cleansing,’ to make way for the development of livestock-breeding. The extermination of the Native populations was tied to the preservation of the sheep-farming economy, and therefore to the interests of the farmers,” Gálvez relates in an interview in press notes (from where his various quotes throughout this review are taken).
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