Northern Chile is a place that seems to exist outside of time and outside of humanity. Its desert landscape — arid and stripped of all vegetation — evokes the surface of another planet more than any inhabited corner of the Earth. And yet it is precisely in this extreme solitude that men have found their livelihood, risking their lives mining copper and other natural resources buried beneath the cracked, dry ground. It is a hard life, defined by isolation and distance from everything familiar.

But that same remoteness that condemns its inhabitants to loneliness also frees them from the weight of others’ judgment. Perhaps that is why, in the world of the film The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025) , the debut feature of 31-year-old Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes, this inhospitable corner of the world becomes a refuge for those whom society neither understood nor accepted. On the outskirts of one of these mining towns, a community of trans women has carved out a space to live together, far from intolerance and incomprehension.

For years, the film depicts miners and trans women coexisting in an improbable but genuine harmony. Amid so much aridity and loneliness, each finds refuge in the company of the other — a coexistence forged not by society, but despite it. But everything changes with the arrival of “la peste” — a mysterious illness from which no one recovers and whose origins no one understands — sowing fear and fracturing the fragile peace they had built together.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo follows Lidia, a twelve-year-old girl, as she navigates fear and prejudice when this illness threatens her queer family. According to local legend, the disease spreads between two men through a single glance — the moment they fall in love. As accusations mount against her family, Lidia must discover whether this myth is real or not, accompanied by her inseparable friend Julio, who clearly wishes he were something more.

The film is set in the early 1980s, under the shadow of Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian regime — a time when dissent and difference were crushed, and those who didn’t fit the official mold were forced to live in the shadows, or as in this case, far from civilization altogether. Neither Pinochet nor AIDS  are ever explicitly named, yet both loom over every scene, some more overtly than others.

The film also dazzles through its performances. While this is truly an ensemble piece, it is Lidia (Tamara Cortés) who carries the film on her shoulders with a radiant presence. She is a girl with a broken heart who sets out to seek answers, and her performance is simply extraordinary. Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca) and the Flamingo (Matías Catalán) — the character for whom the film is named — are equally magnetic, and Julio (Vicente Caballero), Lidia’s inseparable companion, rounds out a young cast of surprising maturity and authenticity.

Blending folklore and magical realism into a deeply, authentically Chilean work, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a remarkable debut for Diego Céspedes. The Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes is richly deserved, and one hopes it gives the film the momentum it needs to reach audiences around the world. Currently in cinemas throughout Chile and released in the United States by boutique distributor Altered Innocence — whose impeccable taste in queer cinema makes anything they release an automatic must-see — the film arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on April 7th. This is the kind of film that is at once beautiful, heartbreaking, and life-affirming. It is not to be missed.