Somewhere on the high plains of La Mancha in Spain resides a village that carries the name of its creator, Francisco Franco. The translation for the village’s name Llanos del Caudillo is The High Plains of the Caudillo. Caudillo is the equivalent to the German Fuehrer (Hitler) or the Italian Duce (Mussolini).
Llanos del Caudillo was one of over 300 settlement villages built during the dictatorship of General Franco between 1939 and 1975. The ideological goal of these communities was to create the new fascist man.
The film portraits this unordinary small town as if we were looking through a magnifying glass, reviewing the Spanish history since Franco took power until the present days, when judge Baltasar Garzón, famous for having prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, has been convicted by the Spanish Supreme Court and banned from office for 11 years because of his attempt to investigate the crimes committed during Franco´s dictatorship.
Franco’s Settlers is a contemporary evaluation of the figure of the dictator Franco; a discreet and calm attempt to dissect recent Spanish history and to review how some Spaniards deal with the heritage of their past.