Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean director who filmed women nobody else would look at

Sebastián Lelio

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 8, 1974 Mendoza, Argentina
Died	November 6, 2026 (52)
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Disobedience, A Fantastic Woman, The Wonder
Awards	Academy Award · Silver Bear (shared) · Teddy · Goya · Guggenheim Fellowship

The last location Sebastián Lelio worked in was a bookshop. Metales Pesados, in Santiago’s Bellas Artes quarter, had been turned into a set for Poeta chileno, his adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s novel about a failed poet who becomes the stepfather of a boy who is not his son. Lelio knew that boy from the inside. As a child he was given his stepfather’s surname, and he grew up as Sebastián Campos. For two decades his camera had stayed with women whom everyone else had stopped looking at: a divorcée alone on a Santiago dance floor, a trans waitress shut out of her lover’s funeral. The film he was making when he died was his first built around men, and the one closest to his own life. He had about a week of shooting left.

He was born in Mendoza, Argentina, the son of an Argentine father, and was taken to Viña del Mar, on the Chilean coast, by his Chilean mother when he was two. He called the childhood that followed nomadic: a stretch in the United States, several Chilean cities, never more than two or three years in the same place. When the Argentine press later celebrated “the Argentine director who won the Oscar”, he corrected them in Clarín: he was born in Argentina, he said, but he was Chilean. His first love was not cinema. As a teenager at a school in Chillán he read Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra, and in Santiago he joined a poetry workshop run by the musician Mauricio Redolés, who still calls him one of the voices that changed his own writing. Lelio’s reading of the experience was more modest. The workshop, he said, taught him that poetry was probably not his medium.

After a year of journalism at Andrés Bello University he trained at the Escuela de Cine de Chile and at ARCIS, then made short films, music videos and Mi mundo privado, a documentary series he co-directed about Chilean families. Born on 8 March 1974, he was 31 when his first feature, La sagrada familia, premiered at San Sebastián in 2005. It was shot in three days and edited over almost a year, and it went on to play more than a hundred festivals. Along the way he took back his biological father’s surname. Navidad went to Cannes in 2009, and El año del tigre, about an escaped prisoner crossing the ruins of the 2010 earthquake, premiered at Locarno in 2011. All three circled religious faith in a country where, as he put it, everything is defined for or against the Catholic version of reality.

Gloria changed his position in 2013. Paulina García played a divorced woman in late middle age who goes out dancing, falls for the wrong man and refuses to become a minor character in her own life. The film premiered in competition at the Berlinale, García won the Silver Bear for Best Actress, and the lines of the poet Claudio Bertoni that run through it showed that the workshop had not been wasted. Its closing image, Gloria alone on the dance floor, became the one people attached to his cinema.

A Fantastic Woman, written with Gonzalo Maza, took the same stubbornness further. Daniela Vega played Marina, a young trans woman in Santiago whose older partner dies suddenly, after which his family, the doctors and the police treat her as a suspect rather than a widow. It won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay and the Teddy Award at the Berlinale in 2017, the Goya for Best Ibero-American Film, and at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018 it gave Chile its first win for Best Foreign Language Film.

English-language cinema came calling. Disobedience, his first English-language film, adapted Naomi Alderman’s novel about two women in a North London Orthodox Jewish community, with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, and opened at Toronto in 2017. A year later he remade his own Gloria as Gloria Bell with Julianne Moore. The Wonder, from Emma Donoghue’s novel, sent Florence Pugh to a famine-scarred Irish village to watch over a girl who appears to live without eating; it opened at Telluride and reached Netflix in November 2022.

The English-language films were handsome and well acted, but two were adaptations and one a copy of his own work, and none carried the authority of the Chilean pictures. His homecoming was meant to answer that. The Wave, a musical drama loosely inspired by the feminist student occupations that swept Chilean universities in 2018, was his most expensive film made in Chile, with songs written alongside seventeen Chilean musicians, Ana Tijoux among them. It premiered at Cannes in May 2025, outside competition. Critics split. Guy Lodge wrote in Variety that its choreography had energy but that its running time exposed “the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama”, and it fell short of commercial expectations; Culto, the culture section of La Tercera, judged it closer to a stumble than a success. For a director whose best films had trusted one face over two hours, a crowd of voices proved harder to hold.

Poeta chileno was a return to that smaller scale. Produced by Fábula with Amazon MGM Studios and starring Felipe Zepeda and Clemente Rodríguez, it follows Gonzalo and his stepson Vicente across years in which both want to be poets. Shooting began in Santiago at the end of September 2026. On 24 October the crew filled Metales Pesados, the bookshop where Vicente works in the novel. A month or so earlier, Lelio had visited Redolés, after three decades without a proper conversation, to ask his old teacher to act in it.

Lelio died at his home in Las Condes, in Santiago, on 6 November 2026. He was 52. His partner, the actress Amalia Kassai, who had played Paz in The Wave, announced his death and attributed it to health complications; no cause has been made public. Filming had continued the day before. Chile declared two days of official mourning on 7 and 8 November, and his wake was held at the Cineteca Nacional, open to the public.

No decision has been announced on how Poeta chileno will be completed, or by whom; that rests with Fábula and its partners. What the finished work already argues is plain enough. From Gloria on the dance floor to Marina at the funeral she was barred from, Lelio built his films on people the room had decided to overlook, and kept the camera on them until the audience changed its mind. The last one was going to be about a stepfather. He did not get to cut it.