Chilean film director and screenwriter Diego Céspedes is only 31 years old. And yet, in a landscape where young directors like Kane Parsons and Curry Baker are making a name for themselves, Céspedes doesn’t feel like an outlier. Instead, it feels like he is right where he’s meant to be.
His film The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La misteriosa mirada del flamenco) is Céspedes’s feature debut, and what a debut it is. The movie follows 12-year-old Lidia as she navigates the burdens of both fear and prejudice after a mysterious illness threatens her queer family in a remote mining town in 1980’s northern Chile. The movie had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2025, where it won the section’s top prize.
The movie is mostly about community, something Céspedes was really interested in conveying. And doing so without trying to minimize how hard building that community can sometimes be. “My personal vision is that things coexist. The reality is that there is a lot of violence and it continues to exist, but there is also a lot of humor. There is a lot of laughter and also a way of survival. And more profoundly, there are people wanting to have a place in the world.”
“In this sense, families are created, mothers are made, mothers are invented, shows are made for themselves. So, I think the need to belong is the most important thing.”
For Céspedes, however, it’s important to show all sides. “I like complexity, and complexity is precisely when more than two elements are mixed, at least. So, I think there is a mix of melodrama, love, tenderness, also a lot of violence, laughter, celebration, and also gunshots and motorcycles,” in this movie. “I think life, as I see it, and as I see our community, is a little more like that.”
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a hard movie, but it’s also a funny movie. And that is something Céspedes was very interested in. “That happens a lot in our community. It’s something I reflected on because it was reality. The trans community is very funny, being one of the most discriminated, and that doesn’t mean they have a beautiful life, but they use it as a survival method and to give meaning to life.”
For Céspedes, these conversations about the movie feel like a long time coming. “It’s been a year since it premiered, two years since we filmed it, seven years since I started writing it,” he shared. And yet, “the film is very alive,” and it means different things to different people. “I think the interpretation that each one has is the right one; it’s your experience with the experience of others together, and no one can change that. You’re going to pursue it like that, and that’s it.”
The movie’s message is about “empathy, the ability to speak, to create a family, the need for everyone to have a space, and how people who were spat by society, went to the middle of the desert, raised a child, formed a family and celebrated.” And “that seems beautiful to me, but it has to do with my life experience, it has to do with my own honesty, I think there is nothing more political than allowing people who could not make films to do it, or people who could not make art to do it, there is the political message, because when you really hear the speech of that person, you are going to have a much deeper reflection of society, than reading three theories or an Instagram post talking about how we should fight poverty.”
“I think the political work for me is the true inclusion of artists in a transversal way, and the message that comes down is inevitable: a person who speaks to you from the belly, who really loves humanity, is going to be there.” And Céspedes cautioned that as important as stories that showcase queer joy are, “the balance of life that we all live is good and bad things.” And “it cannot be just queer joy nor a world of violence.”
“The world is a bit difficult, but for me, the balance is where you find a more complex honesty, precisely in that we laugh, we can live a shitty life and we laugh about it sometimes, but it doesn’t mean that our life is solved and our social problems are cured.” Instead, we get to live. Love. Form communities. Pick each other up. And keep on going. That’s a beautiful message.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is available to stream on MUBI.