Sebastián Lelio Film Career and Legacy, Digi Mart USA News: The last 20 years have seen an remarkable flowering of creativity from Chilean filmmakers. The standard bearers of the Novísimo Cine Chileno, or New Chilean Cinema, have included Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán, who died this year, and Sebastián Silva.
These directors brought global audiences stories of life under Augusto Pinochet’s rule, a regime encouraged and enabled by the United States as an alternative to communism.
There can hardly be a director who dramatized the different aspects of Chile’s complex and conflicted 21st-century zeitgeist more fully than Sebastián Lelio. Some of his films were political and some not obviously so, but all were fierce, passionate and sensual, an expression of defiance against a system that robbed ordinary people of pleasure.
His 2013 film Gloria, starring the award-winning Chilean actor Paulina García, was remade in English in 2018 as Gloria Bell, starring Julianne Moore. The original follows a free-spirited divorcee who seeks fun, sex, love and meaning in singles bars, and finds them with an older gentleman whose relationship with her is complicated by their grown children.
On the surface it does not look like a political film, yet it reflects a generation whose young adulthood was shaped by the Pinochet years.
Lelio’s 2017 film Disobedience, his English-language debut, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, is set in a conservative London Jewish community. Weisz plays Ronit, a rabbi’s daughter whose secret gay identity emerges after her father’s death under unbearable tension.
The film is set far from Lelio’s Latin American home, under gray British skies.
His 2022 film The Wonder, a literary adaptation of a novel by Emma Donoghue, shows his exemplary skill. Florence Pugh plays an English nurse called to a rural Irish community in 1862 to investigate a miracle: a young girl who no longer eats but appears perfectly healthy.
Is this divine grace or a wicked trick by a child who has sensed the adult world’s need to believe in miracles?
For many, Lelio’s masterpiece is A Fantastic Woman, or Una Mujer Fantástica, from 2017, which won the Oscar for best international feature film. Transgender performer Daniela Vega plays Marina, a trans woman in a secret but happy relationship with an older man.
When he dies, Marina is denied any chance to grieve or claim status as his partner, and the film follows her retreat into a hallucinatory dream state. Its tragedy of grief, pain and quiet defiance connects clearly with his Gloria films.
Lelio was a great humanist and a great cinematic poet of ordinary lives.
