Director Felipe Gálvez in his debut feature, The Settlers (Los Colonos) has made a brutal, breathtaking and bold Chilean western film that not only enlightens but keeps the audience engaged till the credits roll. Filmed with a 1.50:1 aspect ratio, the director wants us to focus on the characters rather than get distracted by the stunning landscapes Chile is known for. The colors of this film are very stark and at times over-saturated giving out a retro style that fits well with a film in the Western genre. Most Westerns are made with a story based in the United States but this one takes place in Chile which adds a unique feel when watching the film as it is different from the typical surroundings one would expect from an American western film. The film is not made on a huge scale but that does not deter it from being anything short of an epic.
- 1/15/2024
- by Prem
- Talking Films
A film over a decade in the making, Felipe Gálvez’s directorial debut The Settlers takes a formally thrilling look at the brutal genocide of the now-extinct Selk’nam people, who were native to the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile. Following its premiere at Cannes Film Festival and acquisition by Mubi, the film went on to play at TIFF, NYFF, BFI London, and AFI Fest, was selected as Chile’s Oscar submission, and will now arrive in theaters starting this Friday.
I said in my Cannes review, “Backed by Harry Allouche’s Morricone-inspired score, The Tale of King Crab cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo’s appreciation for vast Leone-esque vistas is apparent, albeit with a more inhospitable, bleak variety as the sun always seems to have just a few dying gasps of light left. It recalls Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja in more than just subject matter: D’Arcangelo shoots these...
I said in my Cannes review, “Backed by Harry Allouche’s Morricone-inspired score, The Tale of King Crab cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo’s appreciation for vast Leone-esque vistas is apparent, albeit with a more inhospitable, bleak variety as the sun always seems to have just a few dying gasps of light left. It recalls Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja in more than just subject matter: D’Arcangelo shoots these...
- 1/11/2024
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
There was no doubt in any IndieWire editor’s mind when selecting our list of the Best First Films of 2023: Felipe Gálvez’s “The Settlers” had to be on there. The otherworldly Western, which Mubi is opening in theaters January 12, is Chile’s submission to the 96th Academy Awards, and you can see why: It’s bold, uncompromising storytelling — for a story that needs to be told. Watch the IndieWire exclusive trailer for “The Settlers” below.
Set in the 1890s, “The Settlers” is about the genocide of the Indigenous Selk’nam people who lived in Tierra del Fuego, where the landscapes look more like Iceland than what you might first associate with South America. This is a history that hasn’t often been taught in Chile, and it’s a mark of the nation’s reckoning with its own history that its selection committee for the Oscars would pick...
Set in the 1890s, “The Settlers” is about the genocide of the Indigenous Selk’nam people who lived in Tierra del Fuego, where the landscapes look more like Iceland than what you might first associate with South America. This is a history that hasn’t often been taught in Chile, and it’s a mark of the nation’s reckoning with its own history that its selection committee for the Oscars would pick...
- 12/7/2023
- by Christian Blauvelt
- Indiewire
The setting is Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the Americas, often called el fin del mundo, and though it is 1901 and the beginning of a new century, it certainly feels like the end of the world. It is in this feeling — the immersive sonic and visual textures of a past in which beauty and brutality snap and snarl at each other’s heels — that director Felipe Gálvez’ debut feature excels. “The Settlers” is a heady, opaque western, slow to stir but vicious as a rattlesnake when it does, that marks a highly promising debut, albeit one marred by dialogue and performances that are not always equal to the tectonic gravitas to which this tale of colonial atrocity aspires.
The hierarchy in these contested lands is established early, and sitting at its top is ruthless landowner José Menéndez. Menéndez needs to establish a trade route so that livestock can...
The hierarchy in these contested lands is established early, and sitting at its top is ruthless landowner José Menéndez. Menéndez needs to establish a trade route so that livestock can...
- 6/30/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
The barbaric, bloody sins of the past come to define what entities govern certain land today, carried out by conquistadors and colonizers who hide behind righteous religious falsities to denigrate an indigenous population. With his directorial debut, a hauntingly conceived Chilean western The Settlers (Los Colonos), Felipe Gálvez localizes an origin story of this horror vis-a-vis the brutal genocide of the now-extinct Selk’nam people, who were native to the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile. While spare early passages are narratively opaque and formally ornate to a distancing fault, the riveting second half––including a chilling reckoning with others occupying the desolate land and a well-executed structural gamble––brings profound expansion to this chilling story of atrocity.
Split into boldly conveyed chapters, The Settlers begins in 1901 in Chile’s Tierra de Fuego province. As commanded by the bloodthirsty José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), a trio of explorers are sent...
Split into boldly conveyed chapters, The Settlers begins in 1901 in Chile’s Tierra de Fuego province. As commanded by the bloodthirsty José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), a trio of explorers are sent...
- 5/26/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
There’s been a recent trend in international arthouse cinema that dates roughly back to two Argentine movies of the past decade: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014).
Both films told dark tales of European colonization, and the massacres inflicted on South America’s Indigenous populations, in ways that felt altogether contemporary, eschewing traditional narratives in favor of something more enigmatic and modern. In such movies, the past was reflected through the lens of the present. The characters all wore period costumes and the sets were made to look like they dated from the epoch, but the stories being told, and the way they were being told, felt very much of our time, as if the horrors were still with us.
This trend continued, albeit in a more playful sense, in the Italian film The Tale of King Crab (2021), and in a more spiritual sense in the...
Both films told dark tales of European colonization, and the massacres inflicted on South America’s Indigenous populations, in ways that felt altogether contemporary, eschewing traditional narratives in favor of something more enigmatic and modern. In such movies, the past was reflected through the lens of the present. The characters all wore period costumes and the sets were made to look like they dated from the epoch, but the stories being told, and the way they were being told, felt very much of our time, as if the horrors were still with us.
This trend continued, albeit in a more playful sense, in the Italian film The Tale of King Crab (2021), and in a more spiritual sense in the...
- 5/22/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In Budd Boetticher’s 1959 parable of how we remember violence, “Ride Lonesome,” Randolph Scott confronts the man who killed his wife at the very spot where he murdered her.
“That was a long time ago,” the killer said. “I’d almost forgot.” Scott’s reply? “A man can do that.”
So too can a society. Especially when it’s all too convenient to forget things so unpleasant they may shake our very sense of identity. Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time,...
“That was a long time ago,” the killer said. “I’d almost forgot.” Scott’s reply? “A man can do that.”
So too can a society. Especially when it’s all too convenient to forget things so unpleasant they may shake our very sense of identity. Felipe Galvez’s Chilean Western “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time,...
- 5/22/2023
- by Christian Blauvelt
- Indiewire
The bizarre tale of an Italian village drunk which switches to a crustacean-assisted treasure hunt aims for warped horror but doesn’t always get it right
A group of elderly Italian men sit around drinking red wine, eating spaghetti and trading local folk stories passed down by their parents and grandparents. It was different back then, explains one old boy; there was no TV, so people had to sit around talking of an evening (though sitting around talking is precisely what this lot are doing). He tells the tale of Luciano, the illegitimate son of a local doctor sometime in the 19th century. It’s a dark story, he warns. Though possibly not dark enough. What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.
Their...
A group of elderly Italian men sit around drinking red wine, eating spaghetti and trading local folk stories passed down by their parents and grandparents. It was different back then, explains one old boy; there was no TV, so people had to sit around talking of an evening (though sitting around talking is precisely what this lot are doing). He tells the tale of Luciano, the illegitimate son of a local doctor sometime in the 19th century. It’s a dark story, he warns. Though possibly not dark enough. What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.
Their...
- 4/18/2022
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
Part Herzogian ecstatic ethnography, part Pasolinian picaresque, “The Tale of King Crab” finds directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis traveling from Italy to Argentina in a two-pronged folktale. The film, which has strands of ’70s arthouse in its DNA — including its immersive shot-on-film imagery — world-premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in summer 2021 and enjoyed a solid run on the festival circuit, including at the New York Film Festival.
Now, Oscilloscope Laboratories will open the film April 15 in New York exclusively at Film at Lincoln Center, followed by a Los Angeles opening April 29. Exclusively on IndieWire, you can watch the trailer for the film below ahead of its stateside release.
The film centers on Luciano (Gabriele Silli), a meandering outcast in a far-off, late-19th-century Italian village. His life is marred by all manner of conflict, from the dangers of drink to forbidden love, as well as unrest with the...
Now, Oscilloscope Laboratories will open the film April 15 in New York exclusively at Film at Lincoln Center, followed by a Los Angeles opening April 29. Exclusively on IndieWire, you can watch the trailer for the film below ahead of its stateside release.
The film centers on Luciano (Gabriele Silli), a meandering outcast in a far-off, late-19th-century Italian village. His life is marred by all manner of conflict, from the dangers of drink to forbidden love, as well as unrest with the...
- 3/24/2022
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab, a story of a 19th-century vagabond who falls in love with the daughter of a local farmer only to run afoul of a prince. (Tough luck.) Later on, astonishingly, he finds himself on the other side of the world.
With that kind of spatial and temporal scope, it’s remarkable that Crab is only the first narrative feature from Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, a duo whose output, while ostensibly non-fiction to this point, has often played on the boundary of fable. Small traces of both Black Beast (their 2013 short about a legendary animal) and Il Sonengo (their 2018 feature documentary about a lone hermit) can be located in Crab, a film with all the texture of a folktale—one passed through generations, the facts blurring and embellishments only growing more ethereal with each retelling.
With that kind of spatial and temporal scope, it’s remarkable that Crab is only the first narrative feature from Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, a duo whose output, while ostensibly non-fiction to this point, has often played on the boundary of fable. Small traces of both Black Beast (their 2013 short about a legendary animal) and Il Sonengo (their 2018 feature documentary about a lone hermit) can be located in Crab, a film with all the texture of a folktale—one passed through generations, the facts blurring and embellishments only growing more ethereal with each retelling.
- 11/11/2021
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
For their narrative debut, documentary filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis tackle a two-pronged film whose two halves share visions of one another, as well as a few familiar faces, but only ever-so-gently collide across disparate worlds. “The Tale of King Crab” divides its time between 19th-century rural Italy and the coast of the southernmost tip of Argentina. Part Herzogian ecstatic ethnography given the verisimilitude at play in the film’s naturalistic settings, and part Pasolinian picaresque in its portrayal of a louche, sotted antihero tumbling through folly upon folly,, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.
At its core, the film is about the feint of storytelling itself, a well-worn topic that can make for a frustrating viewing experience when the directors are trying to go too deep inside their own heads. There’s a framing device that sets up the...
At its core, the film is about the feint of storytelling itself, a well-worn topic that can make for a frustrating viewing experience when the directors are trying to go too deep inside their own heads. There’s a framing device that sets up the...
- 9/30/2021
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
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