The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

Movie Summary: Set in a remote Chilean mining town in 1982, Diego Céspedes’ dazzling debut feature follows young Lidia, who grows up within a vibrant queer household led by drag performers and trans women. When a mysterious illness—rumored to spread through the gaze between men—sows fear and hysteria, the community becomes the target of suspicion and violence. Through Lidia’s eyes, Céspedes crafts a haunting allegory of love, myth, and prejudice that reimagines the early AIDS era as a queer western with poetic intimacy and desert-dry surrealism.