Director Sebastián Lelio, winner of the Oscar for 'A Fantastic Woman', dies at 52

BarcelonaShock in Chilean cinema with the sudden death of Sebastián Lelio, the director of the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman, among other films. Lelio was one of the great Latin American directors of his generation, a regular name at festivals such as the Berlinale and Toronto who made the jump to Hollywood in 2017. According to sources from CNN Chile, the filmmaker was found lifeless at his home, in the Las Condes neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. The family has confirmed his passing: "With great sadness we announce the death due to health reasons of the Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio. We are living through a moment of great pain and his memory will be with us forever". The director was working on his next film, the film adaptation of Alejandro Zambra's novel Poeta chileno, which began filming at the end of September with a cast led by Felipe Zepeda and Clemente Rodríguez.

Lelio, born in 1974 in Mendoza, Argentina, grew up in Chile from the age of two, when his parents, an Argentine architect and a Chilean dancer, separated. He studied cinema at the official film school of Chile and in 2006 he debuted as a director with La sagrada familia, but the film that launched his international career was the drama Gloria (2013), an ode to the right to happiness and second chances starring a divorcee who refuses to give up on love, played by a magnificent Paulina García. Gloria, awarded at the Berlinale, had a North American remake remake in 2019, Gloria Bell, directed by Lelio himself, who recreated his own film shot by shot, this time with Julianne Moore as the protagonist.

Following the success of Gloria, Lelio moved to Berlin and opened a bar named after the film, and in 2017 he returned to the Berlinale with a riskier and more groundbreaking project: A Fantastic Woman, which followed a transgender woman (Daniela Vega, of course, fantastic) in her struggle to live fully and with dignity. Lelio empathetically portrayed the contempt with which the protagonist is treated by her partner's relatives when he suddenly dies of a heart attack, and how institutions render her invisible and prevent her from saying goodbye to the person she loves. Lelio's ability to portray complex female characters without falling into pity or didacticism caused the film to connect with many types of audiences and even win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, a milestone for Chilean cinema.

The Oscar for A Fantastic Woman opened the doors of Hollywood to Lelio, who in 2017 shot the drama Disobedience, in which a lesbian relationship between Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams put an Orthodox Jewish community on the ropes, and in 2022 he produced the period drama The Wonder, for Netflix, with Florence Pugh as an English nurse who watches over a girl from a small Irish village to confirm that she is not ingesting food and to validate her as a divine miracle. After his experience in the United States, Lelio returned to Chilean cinema to direct The Wave, an unconventional musical about feminism and sexual abuse set on a university campus that confirmed Lelio's interest in complex female characters, in women who adopt a dissident position and suffer the consequences. His unexpected death is a very hard blow for Chilean cinema, which just two months ago lost its great documentarian, Patricio Guzmán.