Screening this evening at the Los Feliz Theatre with the American Cinematheque is a new film from Chile – The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, the debut feature film of Diego Céspedes. Starring Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán and Paula Dinamarca, it follows a 12-year-old Lidia as she navigates fear and prejudice when a mysterious illness threatens her queer family in a remote mining town in 1980’s northern Chile. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix and has been selected as Chile’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. Engaged with the same fervent gaze of New Queer Cinema and embodied by a vibrant trans and gender/queer ensemble cast, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a spectacular discovery not to be missed. At the Q&A after the screening, Diego Céspedes provided a great number of insights into the film and its themes. Being quite young, Diego was born after the era of the greatest devastation of AIDS in the 1980s when little was known about AIDS or its transmission. He wanted to capture a time when the promises of “chosen family” emerged as the heart and soul of the LGBTQ community. The film was recently showcased at the AFI Film Festival in Hollywood.
With a contemporary twist melding melodrama and western in a reimagined desert town in 1980s Chile, 11-year-old Lidia is raised by pageant star Flamingo/Flamenco (played by a charismatic Matías Catalán) in a commune of crossdressers led by the fierce Mamá Boa (Paula Dinamarca). Mama Boa runs a cantina frequented by miners from a nearby Chilean mine. In her house, she sets the rules for the group of transvestites who live there as a “safe space” but who also do sex work on the side. Routine drag festivities in the cantina are halted by the sudden reappearance of Flamingo’s past lover, a mysterious miner named Yovani, as rumors of an unknown Plague begin to seethe into acts of petty bullying and fearful superstitions. This is the 1980s and little was known about the Plague (AIDS) or how it was acquired, but from the start it was a death sentence. We sense that most if not all of the transvestites in Mama Boa’s establishment are immune-compromised with pre-AIDS symptoms.
As a new plague begins taking hold, rumors run wild about how prolonged eye-contact – or a loving gaze – shared with a gay man or transgender woman can lead to infection. Eleven-year-old girl Lidia (Tamara Cortés) is bullied about this by her male friends, since her mother Flamenco (Matías Catalán) is a trans woman belonging to a close-knit community of “transvestites” – one of the era-appropriate terms used by the women themselves, among several reclaimed slurs. At the Q&A, young director Diego Céspedes pointed out that in the lingo of the period, the only two operative words in the general culture were “faggot” and “transvestite” – “transsexual” was not “invented” yet.
The women – a lively, fun-loving group with colorful adopted names like Piranha, Lioness and Star – take gentle revenge on Lidia’s behalf by holding the young boys’ eyelids open and forcing them to stare into their eyes, portending a meaningful symbolism. These rumored mechanics of HIV transmission, while reflective of real-world beliefs about touch, were invented wholesale by Céspedes, and they open the movie and its characters up to potent forms of drama rooted in the cinematic gaze. For Flamingo and her sisters to playfully demand the boys look at them is equally a demand to be seen and to have their humanity recognized at a time when the default response to rampant fear is equally rampant dehumanization.
The plot, by and large, concerns Flamingo’s romance with a local miner, a man named Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), who enters the story in heroic fashion at the women’s makeshift cabaret, interrupting Flamingo’s drag performance to stare deep into her eyes. However, Yovani’s adoration quickly curdles, when he reveals he’s taken ill, aggressively blaming the woman he loves. For Flamingo, and for several of the movie’s trans women, men’s love and violent hatred exist in close proximity. They’re made to live as subjects of revulsion by day and secret objects of desire by night, all while risking sudden turns toward brutality born from vulnerable self-loathing.
Amongst growing stigma and paradoxical affliction, history is transgressive in Céspedes’ curious, sprawling tableaus. Queer love — in all its capacities — shines with contradicting exuberance in Diego Céspedes’ audacious debut set at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. When the town is afflicted by a mysterious disease, one that the community alleges is “transmitted when a man falls in love with another through their gaze,” Alexo and his drag friends are accused of being carriers of the disease. Lidia sets out to confront this homophobic myth to protect her only family. The film explores discrimination, community and the world’s need for people “looking each other in the eye.”
The idea that a gaze could transmit AIDS is not one Céspedes ever heard anyone suggest. “It’s a total creation, but in real life, I have heard very similar things,” he says before sharing thoughts fit for the post-truth world. “There was ignorance at that time, and even now. When you don’t have access to information, you create explanations, because us human beings need an explanation for everything. So, I thought that in this fictional town, what they think about the disease can be something that does not confront reality. We’re having sex between men, and that’s the main way of transmission. But why would we say that, if we can create another explanation that fits our way of seeing life.” In the film, Céspedes places the explanation of the “gaze” as the cause of the Plague in the account given by Lidia’s young male friend who has “heard” it from others – and that mysterious tale is re-imagined by him for the young, naive Lidia: That Flamingo gave the miner Yovani the Plague through an intense “gaze.” In the mind of young person like Lidia, “Love and Death” are cousins.
These paradoxical romances – accompanied by the stirring horns of Florencia Di Concilio’s musical score – are entwined with the persistent possibility of tragedy, especially when the local miners decide to impose restrictions on the women’s movement, to the point of entering their home and forcibly blindfolding them. It’s a turn that gradually nudges the film into surreal symbolic territory, as the women both accept and subvert this occupation in unexpected ways.
In that sense, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a plea to face reality and others. In fact, the need for being open to encountering people who are different is a core message that Céspedes feels is very timely. “We grow up in a generation where people are taking very hard positions on who’s the bad one and who’s the good one, but I think we are missing that conversation and that looking each other in the eye.”
