Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes’ first feature won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize in May and has played at a raft of festivals since. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo revolves around 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortés), who has been raised by a queer family in a remote Chilean mining town. It’s the 1980s, and AIDS has just been identified.
Lidia’s family, including Flamingo (Matías Catalán), a trans woman, is blamed for this mysterious illness, leading Lidia on a quest for vengeance and facing violence, fear and hatred. Family is her only refuge and love might be the real danger. The film is Chile‘s official submission for the International Feature Film Oscar race.
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Céspedes, who is 30, told Deadline at Contenders Film: International that he chose to set the movie in the 1980s because his parents had a hair salon in the suburbs of Santiago, “and all of the men that worked there were gay. And all of them died of AIDS. So that’s the story that I grew up with. … My mother, even if she was close to them, she had a lot of prejudices. So I think that I was growing up with this idea of this mysterious and horrible disease surrounding me. But I wanted to understand.”
On choosing to tell the story from Lidia’s perspective, Céspedes noted: “I think that when you tell the story through the eyes of children in general, you play way more with the emotions and not with such a constructed world. Because when we are adults, we are exposed to so many things, so many dark things and luminous things, but we get a lot of prejudices… And a child, they don’t have this; they just follow what their heart tells them. So it was for me a freedom to play with this, to play with the feelings of this girl, a girl that was inspired in my own sisters.”
Finding Cortés, who Céspedes calls “a very free soul,” to play Lidia came after “a huge casting in Chile.” The young actress had “two main things. … She didn’t care too much about the acting. She didn’t think too much about it. She was very natural … and also, she didn’t have any prejudices. … She’s so funny and she’s so talented and a nice person.”
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Of winning the top Un Certain Regard award with his feature debut, Céspedes remarked that it was particularly poignant given UCR “was my favorite section of the Cannes Film Festival” even before he was selected. “It brings the new faces and the new voices.” A 2018 short Céspedes directed, The Summer of the Electric Lion, previously won the Premier Prize of the Cinéfondation.
Check out the panel video above.