In Mr Porter’s absence, he is consigned to an extended stay among the (overwhelmingly male) settlers, whose exploits he dignifies with his camera but whose company he shuns – initially, at least. Pedro doesn’t find much else to appreciate here. In an early, uncomfortable scene, Pedro blithely “arranges” Sara into what he considers an attractive pose, pulling her wedding dress off her shoulders, ostensibly for the groom’s benefit: “He’ll like it better this way.” The scene is to be reprised even more excruciatingly later on, after Pedro takes a shine to Sara and sets up a more “artistic” photoshoot. But when he arrives, Mr Porter is nowhere to be found only his bride, Sara, who looks little older than a teenager. This is Pedro (Alfredo Castro), a middle-aged loner who has been brought to this end-of-the-world location to take the wedding portrait of Mr Porter, the big landowner. It’s a sombre study of the corrupted values and decayed morals that enabled a genocide it centres on a photographer who considers himself superior to the coarse white settlers around him, but is really part of the same system. C olonisation does not come off well in this sparse and striking drama, set in snowbound 19th-century Tierra del Fuego.
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