The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025)
Director: Diego Céspedes Run Time: 104 min. Release Year: 2025 Language: Spanish
Starring: Claudia Cabezas, Luis Dubó, Matías Catalán, Paula Dinamarca, Tamara Cortés
Country: France, Chile, Germany, Spain, Belgium
Language: Spanish
About the film:
Un Certain Regard Award, Cannes Film Festival. Chile’s Official Submission for the 2026 Academy Awards, Best International Feature Film.
Set in a remote Chilean mining town in 1982, Diego Céspedes’ dazzling debut feature follows young Lidia, who grows up within a vibrant queer household led by drag performers and trans women. When a mysterious illness—rumored to spread through the gaze between men—sows fear and hysteria, the community becomes the target of suspicion and violence. Through Lidia’s eyes, Céspedes crafts a haunting allegory of love, myth, and prejudice that reimagines the early AIDS era as a queer western with poetic intimacy and desert-dry surrealism.
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025) recalls the emotional vibrancy of Almodóvar and continues Chile’s proud legacy of queer cinema—marking Céspedes as one of the most exciting new voices in world cinema.
“Set during the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, Diego Céspedes’ gentle, funny, passionate, and occasionally absurdist debut drama packs an enormous emotional punch.”
—Siddhant Adlakha, Variety
About the filmmaker:
Diego Céspedes is a Chilean filmmaker. He studied film and television at the University of Chile. He has worked as director of photography and montage editor for different short films, among which is Non Castus (2016), which received a special mention at the Locarno Festival. In 2018, he wrote and directed his first short film, The Summer of the Electric Lion, which won the first prize of the Cinéfondation at the Cannes Festival, the NEST Panavision award at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and was selected at a variety of festivals including Sundance and Palm Springs. His first feature-length film, La misteriosa mirada del flamenco (The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, 2025) premiered at Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, winning the prestigious Un Certain Regard Award.
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