Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean Filmmaker Who Let His Heroines Have the Last Word

The first thing Marina has to do after Orlando dies is explain herself. She has taken him to hospital, where the doctors cannot save him. Then come the questions. A police inspector wants to know what happened. His family wants her out of his apartment and away from his funeral. Marina, a waitress and singer played by Daniela Vega, wants something far simpler. She wants to mourn the man she loved.

That is the contest at the heart of A Fantastic Woman. In lesser hands, Marina might have spent the film proving herself to the people interrogating her. Sebastián Lelio and his co-writer Gonzalo Maza give her a life beyond their questions. She sings. She fights for the chance to say goodbye. The film can be furious on her behalf and still find room for her pleasure, her vanity and her sense of humour. Chile won the 2018 Academy Award for Foreign Language Film for it, the country’s first in that category.

Lelio died in Santiago on Friday, November 6, aged 52. His partner, actor Amalia Kassai, announced his death on behalf of the family, citing health complications. The family did not specify a cause. In its tribute, the Berlinale remembered a filmmaker whose work it had championed and who returned in 2019 to serve on its international jury.

The Woman on the Dance Floor

Born in Mendoza, Argentina, Lelio moved to Chile at two. He studied journalism briefly before going to film school. His first narrative feature, La Sagrada Familia, screened at San Sebastián in 2005. Shot with a handheld camera, it follows a family’s Easter weekend as the arrival of a son’s girlfriend upsets the household. A family could be a whole society in a Lelio film, with its own rules about who could speak and what everyone else agreed to leave unsaid.

His international breakthrough came with Gloria. Paulina García plays a 58-year-old divorcée in Santiago whose children have left home and whose evenings are her own. She goes dancing, takes a chance on a man and discovers how much room his old life leaves for her. García won the Silver Bear for best actress at Berlin in 2013. Lelio returned to the story in Gloria Bell, with Julianne Moore playing its American incarnation. The remake made sense for a director who understood how much a different actor could bring to the same woman’s evening out.

The Right to Grieve

At Berlin in 2017, A Fantastic Woman won the Teddy Award and the Silver Bear for best screenplay, shared by Lelio and Maza. Its life in Chile extended beyond the prizes. Lelio later told The Guardian that a gender identity bill had been stalled in Congress for years and that the film helped revive the discussion. It was one contribution to a much longer fight over legal recognition for trans people.

The film’s force comes from Vega. The people around Marina repeatedly ask her to give an account of herself. Vega makes you feel the indignity of the demand and the effort it takes to keep your composure while making it clear that Marina owes them very little. Watch her and you understand what the funeral exclusion costs before anyone has to explain it.

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

In Disobedience, Lelio moved to an Orthodox Jewish community in north London. Rachel Weisz plays a photographer who returns after her father’s death and is reunited with a woman she once loved, played by Rachel McAdams. Lelio told the British Film Institute that he was drawn to making a character rarely seen at the centre of a mainstream film its focus. The drama gives weight to the choices the women make and to what each might lose by making them.

The Wonder gives Florence Pugh a different kind of outsider to play. Her English nurse arrives in 1862 Ireland to observe a girl said to have gone months without eating. Before Pugh appears, Lelio shows us the modern studio in which the film was made. It is an audacious opening for a period drama about people invested in a story they need to believe. The film went on to earn a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film.

Lelio returned to Chile for his last completed film, The Wave, which premiered at Cannes in 2025. He made a musical about a campus uprising against sexual harassment, following a music student named Julia who is trying to understand an encounter of her own even as the movement gathers around her. At his death, he had begun filming an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet.

In The Wave, a woman’s account can move a crowd. In A Fantastic Woman, a woman has to fight to be allowed into a room. Lelio understood the distance between those two things, and how much courage it can take simply to cross the threshold.

With inputs from ANI