Few Latin American filmmakers moved between a Santiago dance hall and a Hollywood soundstage as easily as Sebastián Lelio, and fewer still made a film that fed directly into a change in the law at home. The Chilean director of A Fantastic Woman, the drama that gave Chile its first Academy Award for a feature, died on Friday at his home in Santiago, in the middle of shooting what was to be his tenth feature. He was fifty-two.

His partner, the actress Amalia Kassai, announced the death on Instagram, attributing it to “health reasons” and asking, on behalf of the Lelio Kassai and Campos Watt families, for “respect for our privacy and consideration during these difficult times.” As Variety reported, citing the Chilean outlet El Mercurio Online, Kassai contacted police after he was found at his home in the Las Condes district. The family has released no further medical details.

Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1974 and raised in Chile from the age of two, Lelio trained at the Escuela de Cine de Chile and debuted with La Sagrada Familia (2005), a family drama shot in three days. Navidad (2009) took him to the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and The Year of the Tiger (2011) to Locarno. The breakthrough was Gloria (2013), his portrait of a divorcée in her late fifties who refuses to apologise for wanting a life of her own, which won Paulina García the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin.

A Fantastic Woman, co-written with Gonzalo Maza, starred Daniela Vega as a trans woman grieving her older partner while his family treats her as a suspect in his death. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2018, along with the Independent Spirit Award for best international film and the Goya for best Ibero-American film. Its visibility helped the campaign that ended with Chile’s Gender Identity Law, enacted that December.

The success opened English-language doors. Lelio directed Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams in Disobedience (2017), remade his own breakthrough as Gloria Bell (2018) with Julianne Moore and John Turturro, and made The Wonder (2022) for Netflix starring Florence Pugh. After seven years in Berlin he went home for The Wave, a musical inspired by Chile’s 2018 feminist mobilisations that premiered at Cannes in 2025 and divided critics.

When he died he was shooting Chilean Poet, his adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s novel, produced by Fábula, the company of Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín that had backed every Chilean film he made since The Year of the Tiger. Fábula’s farewell praised his gift for putting at the centre “women whom cinema had so often left on the margins,” and sent condolences to the crew he was filming with.

Chile’s culture ministry said his wake will be held at the Cineteca Nacional, inside the Centro Cultural La Moneda: the national film archive receiving the man who brought the country its first feature-film Oscar, with his latest film still unfinished.

Tags: obituary, Chilean cinema, Gloria, Sebastián Lelio, A Fantastic Woman, Daniela Vega

Sebastián Lelio, Oscar-winning Chilean director of A Fantastic Woman, dies at 52 mid-shoot

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