Long before Pedro Pascal popularised the “Protect the Dolls” slogan in the pop culture public conscience, trans communities have been living, resisting, and demanding to be seen on their own terms. It is thus both powerful and fitting that this year’s Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Grand Prix goes to a film that centres their stories with raw, unflinching beauty. Welcome to a rural house, shared by transgender women in a remote Chilean mining town—a place thick with smoke, sweat, and secrets. Here, under the gaze of the early 1980s, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo unfolds; it’s the absolutely fascinating debut feature of Diego Céspedes, a film that doesn’t just tell a story but also gently insists you lean in.
At its complicated core is Lidia (Tamara Cortés), a 12-year-old girl too young to carry tragedy but too old to remain untouched by it. After her mother, a flamboyant figure nicknamed Flamingo (Matías Catalán), is crucially beaten to death by her on-again, off-again loser of a lover Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), Lidia is left to navigate a community crumbling under the weight of fear, prejudice, and spectacular outfits. It’s not just personal grief Lidia must weather: a strange, possibly supernatural illness is sweeping through the queer population, rumored to be spread not by blood or touch, but by the act of a loving glance between a man and a transgender woman.
This is no ordinary coming-of-age tale. It’s as if Céspedes formed the story from discarded plotlines of an abandoned Pedro Almodóvar western and the ashes of every telenovela, like El cuerpo del deseo, that eventually gets too odd to follow. Set against a backdrop of saloons that could have been pulled straight from Red Dead Redemption, this queer commune is held together by Mamma Boa (Paula Dinamarca), a witchy matriarch whose presence feels both ancient and deeply familiar. Boa teaches Lidia not just to survive but also to resist—starting with a practical lesson in testicular defense that feels like feminist folklore. It’s absurd, empowering, grotesque—and tender, like the film in a nutshell.
Visually, the movie operates in a tight 4:3 ratio, trapping its characters and their environments to an enclosed space. Céspedes makes excellent use of the desert landscape’s bleached hostility with every frame being glazed with dust and rust. The camera, often still, observes with a cool detachment that turns even the most intimate scenes, like Lidia’s bond with a local boy named Alexo, into emotional mirages.
At the film’s heart is not only a mystery but a commentary on the AIDS crisis—on queer fear and desire, on the grotesque contortions of love under societal pressure. There’s a fable-like logic to the way men aren’t plagued by germs but instead from looking too long. The disease in The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo isn’t just physical: it’s social, moral, and viral, laying low within the gossip-soaked breath of small-town bigotry.
While the narrative does flirt with melodrama—guns are drawn, sex is had against trees, and people are both healed and harmed with a glance—Céspedes doesn’t let the spectacle drown the soul. He’s interested in lives not usually given the platform: queer bodies, trans mothers and orphaned daughters. The flamboyance never erases the film’s fury.
So, what is it that makes Flamingo’s gaze so mysterious? Throughout the film, I channelled my inner Hercule Poirot, arriving at the conclusion that the best part of it is, in fact, the character of Flamingo. After her death, the film tries to recapture a certain je ne sais quoi, but it only partially succeeds. What remains is yet another portrayal of a difficult childhood that attempts to deepen its narrative through the inclusion of transgender characters, but it just doesn’t do justice to the short-lived vibrancy of the film’s first third. That elusive atmospheric main character quality unfortunately dies with Flamingo. Nevertheless, the award is well-deserved and represents a minority that needs to be protected. In The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, dolls bleed and fight and sometimes disappear into smoke, but they are never passive.
