Chilean director Fernando Guzzoni, whose "Blanquita" won the Silver Lion for best screenplay at Venice four years ago, is returning to the festival's Gap-Financing Market with a new project. "Land of the Savages" will star Édgar Ramírez ("Zero Dark Thirty") and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart ("120 Beats Per Minute"), and confronts Chile's largely unacknowledged history of slavery, a subject Guzzoni says is absent from the country's schooling.

Set in 1850, the film follows Elías, a slave-owning businessman haunted by his past, and Francisco, an abolitionist from the bourgeoisie, played respectively by Ramírez and Pérez Biscayart. Guzzoni said the idea grew from researching Chile's erased "three centuries of slavery" after observing xenophobic reactions to Haitian immigration, and he sees the film as exploring how Latin American elites maintain power. Foton Pictures CEO Carlos E. Cuscó said the production is still finalising financing and seeking a European co-producer, describing the current climate for such films as increasingly difficult.