Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean director behind A Fantastic Woman, has died aged 52
The filmmaker died at home on Friday 6 November. His family, in a statement shared by his partner Amalia Kassai, said he died of health causes and asked for privacy. He was in the middle of shooting Poeta Chileno, an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra's novel.
Chilean director Sebastián Lelio died on Friday 6 November, aged 52. As Chile’s BioBioChile radio reported, his family confirmed the death in a statement shared by his partner, Amalia Kassai, which gave health reasons as the cause and asked for privacy.
Several Chilean outlets say he died at home. No further details have been released.
Who was Sebastián Lelio?
He was born in Mendoza, Argentina, on 8 March 1974, grew up in Chile and trained at the Escuela de Cine de Chile. His early films, La Sagrada Familia (2005) and Navidad (2009), were small, loose and low-budget.
Gloria changed that in 2013. His portrait of a divorcée nearing sixty, looking for life on Santiago’s dance floors, won Paulina García the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin.
Then came A Fantastic Woman in 2017. Daniela Vega plays a trans woman whose partner dies suddenly, and who then has to fight for the simple right to mourn him. It won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2018, the first for a Chilean feature. Portugal is chasing the same award this year with a film shot entirely inside Coimbra.
What did Lelio make in English?
After the Oscar he worked in English without changing his subject. Disobedience (2017) paired Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, and Gloria Bell (2018) remade his own breakthrough with Julianne Moore. In 2022 he directed The Wonder for Netflix, starring Florence Pugh.
He went home for La Ola (2025), a musical drawn from the feminist occupations that swept Chilean universities in 2018.
What was he working on when he died?
He was shooting Poeta Chileno, based on Alejandro Zambra’s novel about a stepfather, a stepson and poetry as a way into a family. Nothing has been said yet about what happens to the film.
Women who refuse to ask permission to exist run through almost all of his work. For many viewers, they were the way in.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Paul Katzenberger / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)