Meeting at the headquarters of the Prensa Latina news agency, which announced the award, the jury highlighted the level of this co-production between Chile, Argentina, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and Taiwan, competing in the Opera prima category.
According to the jury’s report, the 97-minute film addresses in a different way what is customary to see on the international big screen, in terms of denouncing the excesses of colonization in Latin America.
It stands out how through the film, Gálvez launches a tacit questioning about the sugar-coated image of the official narratives about the conquest of the Patagonian territories, in this case, the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego.
Likewise, he warns that country, like Argentina, was also built on the genocide of the indigenous population.
“The Colonizers” portrays in a different way, the document points out, the crimes committed by colonizers and how even today that heritage lacerates the cultural legacy of those civilizations.
“On the other hand, it also shows the dignity of those indigenous ancestors, their rejection and confrontation of barbarism, which in the film even comes disguised as modernity,” the text noted.
The representatives of the media OnCuba, Correo Canadiane, Sputnik, VNA, Al Mayadeen, Sana, The Havana Reporter and Prensa Latina, recognized that this is a current film, not just about the past, because it talks about a problem that still persists.
In this sense, he referred to the struggles of the Mapuche people, almost exterminated in both Chile and Argentina, in defense of their rights to maintain their autonomy in their ancestral territories and to exist as a nation.
Filmed in the style of western movies, it narrates the journey through the territories of Tierra del Fuego, at the beginning of the 20th century, of an English soldier, an American cowboy and a mestizo shepherd, in charge of imposing the supposed ownership of a Chilean landowner and to exterminate any indigenous people that appear in their path.
The jury also decided to award a Mention to the Cuban film “A Night with the Rolling Stones”, by Patricia Ramos, for its narration, from a female story, about the dilemmas of the country’s daily life, its existential conflicts, love, disappointment, as well as the drama that surrounds the phenomenon of emigration in families. The award was established in 1985 with the aim of stimulating the new Latin American cinema movement, which emerged with singular force in the 1960s to propose the search for a decolonized visual image.
From these budgets it was named after the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the pioneers of that movement and creator of classics such as “God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun” and “Antonio das Montes”, among other films which are considered one of the highest exponents of Latin American cinematography.
ef/ro/mml
