Sebastián Lelio obituary: Chilean director of compassionate, women-centred dramas

Few contemporary filmmakers approached questions of transgression, acceptance and desire with the empathy and nuance of Sebastián Lelio, who has died aged 52. He was one of a generation of directors, alongside Pablo Larraín, Sebastián Silva and Andrés Wood, who energetically revitalised Chilean cinema, revisiting the Pinochet years through the lens of a democratic nation still haunted by the dictatorship’s legacy.

Graduating from the Escuela de Cine de Chile, he followed a series of shorts with Cero, a documentary about 9/11, co-directed by Carlos Fuentes. His first two features, boasting religious titles, La sagrada familia (2005) and Navidad (2009), explored the tensions of pressured cohabitation with a cinéma vérité ethos. The Year of the Tiger, his first collaboration with producers Pablo and Juan de Díos Larraín, consolidated an approach to filmmaking shaped by lean scripts, improvisation and a quasi-documentary feel, which owed much to Lelio’s rhythmic editing – he had an editing credit on his first four features.

The uplifting Gloria (2013) proved his breakthrough film, announcing Lelio as a filmmaker of originality and verve. It centres on the adventures of feisty fiftysomething divorcée Gloria Cumplido, who puts the past to one side in a search for love, passion and companionship. In Paulina García’s luminous performance, awarded Berlin’s Silver Bear for Best Actress, the film celebrated a defiant female sexuality. At once an intimate character study and a reflection on contemporary Chile – Gloria’s love interest Rodolfo was shown as an infantilised male trapped in the misogyny promoted by the Pinochet regime. A soundtrack that moved effortlessly between Bach, Mahler, Umberto Tozzi and Donna Summer mirrored Gloria’s emotional journey. Music, Lelio once told me, operated like a Greek chorus in the film.

British musician Matthew Herbert was a trusted collaborator on the scores for his subsequent films, with his haunting compositions sitting alongside pop songs from Aretha Franklin’s ‘A Natural Woman’ in A Fantastic Woman to The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’ in Disobedience (both 2017). A Fantastic Woman reaffirmed his gift for women-centred storytelling, eliciting a memorable performance from Daniela Vega as the grief-stricken trans nightclub singer Marina Vidal, navigating prejudice in the aftermath of her partner’s sudden death. It was the first Chilean film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.

Disobedience was the first of his films in English. With this adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, he continued exploring the defiance of women pursuing their own path, often in the face of harsh institutional pressure; in this case, Rachel Weisz as photographer Ronik Krushka returning on hearing of her father’s death to the north London Jewish Orthodox community she had left years earlier. As in The Wonder (2022), an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel, Lelio’s outsider eye captured the strangeness of a world where its protagonist is never quite settled or accepted. In the latter film, Florence Pugh’s English nurse Lib, invited into a remote Irish community to provide witness testimony of a supposed miracle, offered an arresting reflection on that which cannot always easily be explained. An element of mystery haunts all Lelio’s works. 

Lelio trusted actors in the crafting of a role. The camera is more often an observer than an intrusive presence. He was never afraid of letting films breathe, with silence often deployed in unsettling ways. Remaking Gloria in English as Gloria Bell (2018), with Julianne Moore in the title role, Lelio used a musical analogy in describing his approach: “a melody that we once created, played again in a new context and by a new band”. His one musical, The Wave (2025), a Brechtian piece departing from the 2018 social protests in Chile, was both formally ambitious and politically committed. The metatheatrical elements – Lelio filmed himself confronted by his characters for tackling women’s experiences as a male director – were indicative of an approach to filmmaking that was always self-reflective, always rooted in the idea of cinema as a bridge and space for conversation. 

A gentle, humble man, he was generous in his praise of collaborators and contemporaries, including the crop of younger directors – Maite Alberdi, Dominga Sotomayor and Manuela Martelli – who had emerged over the past 15 years. At the time of his death, he had been filming an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s 2020 novel Chilean Poet. He was also developing an English-language treatment of the American astronomer Carl Sagan, Voyagers, with Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones heading the cast.

• Sebastián Lelio, 8 March 1974 to 6 November 2026