‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’ Review: A Chilean Drama About HIV and Transgender Romance

In the middle of the Chilean desert of the 1980s, a little girl grew up in a trans cabaret.

‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’ Review: A Chilean Drama About HIV and Transgender Romance

Set in the 1980s, Diego Céspedes’ period drama 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' battles bigotry with both vengeance and compassion.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo – first-look review

In striking opening credits, boiling copper pours from atop a grey mountain like lava, a sluggish, powerful current that exists as a dichotomy: the light it powers shines over the lands it’s made barren. This mesmerizing sequence is how we are introduced to Diego Céspedes’s atmospheric feature debut, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, where sex is also a powerful current and, in that, a dichotomy of its own. It’s 1982 in a small mining village…

Pedro Pascal's Sister Lux Pascal Brings a True Story to Life in Spanish-Language Film 'Miss Carbón' as a Trans Latina Miner

That is Lux Pascal, an actress of Chilean descent, standing still in the heavy silence before the mine.

'The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo'

Is love a hazard, or will it save the day? Chilean writer-director Diego Céspedes explores that query and the theme of household and group as a refuge in his characteristic debut The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, which world premieres in Cannes‘ Un Sure Regard part on Thursday. It tells the story of Lidia, 11, “who grows up in a loving queer household pushed to the sting of an unwelcoming dusty mining city,” in line with a synopsis. “They’r…

Review: The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

15/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: The desert puts on its gala clothes in Diego Céspedes' first feature, a queer film in which desire, love and death intertwine in a baroque spectacle tinged with a western atmosphere