Showtimes
Festival Theaters 7
By Valerie Milano & Jim Gilles
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/2/26 – Among the international discoveries featured at this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival is an extraordinary debut from Chile, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, written and directed by Diego Céspedes. The film stars Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán, and Paula Dinamarca, and unfolds in a remote mining town in northern Chile during the 1980s, a time marked by fear, misinformation, and deep social prejudice.
Told largely through the eyes of a young girl named Lidia, the story follows her coming of age as a mysterious illness spreads through her community, threatening the queer family that has raised her. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix, and it has since been selected as Chile’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. Most recently, the film was showcased at the AFI Film Festival before making its way to Palm Springs.
Rooted in the spirit of New Queer Cinema and brought vividly to life by a predominantly trans and gender-queer ensemble cast, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is both visually striking and emotionally disarming. Following its Palm Springs screening, Céspedes shared thoughtful insights during a recent Q&A, reflecting on the era that inspired the film. Born after the height of the AIDS crisis, the director approached the story not from lived memory but from an urgent desire to understand how fear, love, and misinformation shaped queer lives in a time when knowledge was scarce and stigma was deadly.
At the heart of the film is Lidia, an 11-year-old girl raised within a chosen family of drag performers and trans women. Her maternal figure is Flamingo, also known as Flamenco, a former pageant star portrayed with warmth and charisma by Matías Catalán. Flamingo lives in a desert commune led by the formidable Mamá Boa (Paula Dinamarca), who runs a cantina that doubles as a cabaret and sanctuary for a group of trans women and cross-dressers. While the cantina offers refuge, it is also a workplace, reflecting the precarious balance between safety and survival for queer communities of the era.
The women’s world is disrupted when Flamingo’s former lover, a miner named Yovani, suddenly reappears. At the same time, rumors begin circulating about an unnamed “plague.” Set before widespread public understanding of HIV/AIDS, the film captures a moment when illness was synonymous with fear and condemnation. Céspedes subtly suggests that many of the women may already be showing early symptoms of immune compromise, deepening the sense of looming tragedy without ever resorting to exploitation.
As hysteria spreads, so does superstition. In the town’s collective imagination, the disease is rumored to be transmitted through prolonged eye contact, or worse, through love itself. Lidia becomes the target of cruel teasing from local boys because her mother is transgender, and because her family exists outside the town’s rigid moral norms. During the Q&A, Céspedes noted that in the language of the time, society had only two widely used terms, both slurs, to describe queer identity, underscoring how limited and damaging cultural understanding truly was.
In one of the film’s most poignant sequences, the women turn cruelty into resistance. They confront the boys by forcing them to look directly into their eyes, a moment that is playful, defiant, and deeply symbolic. The act transforms the gaze from something feared into something powerful: a demand to be seen, acknowledged, and humanized. While the notion that HIV could be transmitted through eye contact is entirely fictional, Céspedes uses it to mirror the very real myths that surrounded physical contact and queer bodies during the early years of the epidemic.
The film’s emotional center is Flamingo’s relationship with Yovani, portrayed by Pedro Muñoz. Their romance begins with tenderness and awe but quickly devolves into accusation and violence once Yovani falls ill. Love and hatred exist dangerously close together, particularly for the trans women, who are desired in secret and reviled in daylight. Céspedes captures this contradiction with remarkable sensitivity, showing how affection can so easily curdle into brutality when filtered through fear and internalized shame.
Despite the encroaching darkness, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo remains defiantly alive. The women, bearing names like Piranha, Lioness, and Star; radiate joy, humor, and resilience. Their bonds are playful yet profound, rooted in mutual care and shared survival. Through Lidia’s eyes, the film becomes a story about protecting family, challenging myths, and learning to look at the world with compassion rather than fear.
Céspedes has described the invented mythology of the “gaze” as a reflection of how humans respond when deprived of truth. When facts are absent, stories rush in to fill the void. In Lidia’s young mind, love and death become intertwined, two forces she cannot yet separate, but must confront in order to defend the people she loves.
As the miners attempt to impose control by restricting the women’s movement and eventually blindfolding them, the film drifts into surreal, allegorical territory. These moments are haunting and unforgettable, pushing the story beyond realism into something closer to myth. The women’s response is neither passive nor predictable, reinforcing the film’s insistence on agency even in the face of oppression.
Ultimately, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a meditation on visibility. Céspedes argues that so much cruelty stems from refusing to truly see one another. In a world increasingly divided by certainty and blame, his film makes a quiet but urgent plea for empathy, one gaze at a time.
The film will screen twice at the Palm Springs International Film Festival:
Monday, January 5, 2026, at 7:15 PM at the Mary Pickford Theatre, and
Saturday, January 10, 2026, at 5:15 PM at Festival Theatres.
Director Diego Céspedes is expected to attend both screenings.
For tickets and additional information, visit the festival’s official website.
