The Selknam murder: the harsh and violent portrait of The Colonists, a Chilean film awarded at Cannes

The movie wasn’t finished yet when people started clapping. The hands of more than a thousand people clapped nonstop on May 22, 2023, when, after nine years of pitfalls, he came out settlers . The Chilean film openly depicts the violent Selk’nam Genocide that took place in the last century in Chile.

It was at the Cannes Film Festival, in France, that the work of the director and co-screenwriter of the film was recognized, Philippe Galvez . But this distance was not felt by miles alone, but by how hard it is to do movie theater in Chile, and even more if it is a tragic history that many have decided to forget.

The filmmaker transports us to Chilean Patagonia in 1901, where a wealthy breeder hires an English lieutenant and an American mercenary to open a route for his sheep to the Atlantic. But a mixed-race Chilean, who guides them on the road, inadvertently turns away accomplice in a violent manhunt native .

—Selk’nam are graffiti, stickers, plushies, fridge magnets, wine labels, logos for clothing and ice cream parlors, and more. The question is: do people use them as a way to express how terrible the genocide of their people was or as a pop image? — says Felipe Gálvez, director of settlers in conversation with The third .

A mixture of ignorance and denial, perhaps, but for the filmmaker the story is important. For this reason, he decided that his spectators travel back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century, to revive a history that has been erased from the national consciousness, that is “shameful, violent and replaced by a pretty name”.

—In the history of Chile there is a bloody violence that is forgotten and hidden . To reflect on Holocaust denial, which is something that is repeated a lot in our history, as with the dictatorship, it was good to go back further, to a history erased from the official pages of the country, ”explains the filmmaker.

With their production team, their script and the group of national and international actors, including Alfredo Castro, Marcelo Alonso, Camilo Aranbicia, Benjamín Westfall, Mishell Guaña and the English Mark Stanley (of Game of Thrones) and Sam Spurell, they are left for the march .to Tierra del Fuego, in Chilean Patagonia, to to stage a fiction based on real facts.

Gálvez remembers the cold, the unpredictable weather and the beautiful landscapes. But above all, the encouragement and commitment of his entire team, who shared with him the mission of telling the forgotten history of the indigenous peoples who had taken up residence on these lands.

—Sometimes it was at night, it was very cold and we could barely stay still, even though we were super protected with special clothes, compared to the actors who were in period costumes. Really It was a gigantic physical and mental effort on the part of all the technicians and actors for participating in this film.

“It’s nice to feel that the environment is one that believes in taking risks, that affection that you start to feel from people when they join in for help. It was like a feeling that this story had to be told, that it had to be talked about and that is why it was necessary to give everything —the filmmaker is sincere with The third .

And it is that despite the fact that the film has touches of humor, adventure and emotion, it was inevitable to show the racism, brutality and violence suffered by the Selk’nam people a resource the director used to stop “sweetening” the story and tell it as it was.

We are used to seeing violence in movies. But it’s different when this violence involves us as a country. This generates a shock and a lot of emotions. In settlers It’s a violence that makes you think, that provokes, that makes you uncomfortable Galvez reveals.

In Chile, they repeatedly closed the door to him . On the other hand, with other international aid, he gradually acquired what was necessary to enable the filming of the history of the Selk’nams. Galvéz reveals to LT What settlers the assembly was completed in France, the color was edited in Italy and the sound in Taiwan.

—We have received little from Chile. The film (which is low budget) It cost almost 1 million 600 thousand dollars, and from the country we received 220 thousand dollars approximately.

The filmmaker affirms that this type of obstacle makes Chilean directors tend to carry out their projects with the fear of making a mistake.

“In Chile, we cannot make films freely. There’s no possibility to experiment, to do artistic work because, what if it doesn’t come out? How can you be wrong and believe that there will be another opportunity?

The lack of budget and opportunities is also reflected in the fact that after the first major challenge of raising funds, there is the second: succeeding in distributing the film in theaters across the country. And it is that Although it is a national film, there is still no confirmed date to see the Chilean production settlers This is not the case in countries like the United States and Europe.

—We have to go out and compete with Marvel, for example, and all the mega-productions with absolutely nothing. Now, together with the team, we are trying to find a way to show the film, ”explains Galvéz, with a note of concern to lt.

—For me, it won’t be finished until it’s seen in Chile.