Tierra del Fuego, Republic of Chile, 1901. José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) is entrusted with land by the state. In order to open up the route to the Atlantic, this wealthy Spanish landowner hires three horsemen, ostensibly to demarcate the land. As the expedition progresses, Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a Chilean of mixed race, realizes that he is in fact in charge of emptying the land of its indigenous population and 'civilizing' this immense, fertile territory, under the urgent orders of Lieutenant MacLennan (Sam Spruell), a bloodthirsty, lawless Briton, and an American mercenary.
With Les Colons, presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes 2023 Festival, Felipe Gálvez returns to fiction to bear witness to the massacre of the Onas Indian tribe in Tierra del Fuego by the white aristocracy. The Chilean filmmaker criss-crosses this vast land of rare beauty with long desert panoramas in which the three horsemen move in Indian thread under a sky reminiscent of some of the high paintings by Scottish artist Peter Graham. Behind this picture-postcard image, however, lies a genocide of unprecedented violence, recounted through real testimonies, and indecently ignored by official history.
By choosing to tell his story from the point of view of the settlers (right down to the title), Felipe Gálvez plays with the codes of the Western in a sober manner - only a few blood-red, large-format titles, referring in turn to "the red pig", "the king of white gold" and "the half-breed", fill the frame and color the montage. Buoyed by a galloping score with Morriconian accents in its first third, the film forcefully explores the traumatic memory of a society built on theextermination of a people, whatever the cost in bloodshed and lies.
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