The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025)

The Gaze of the Other

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, the Cannes-premiered film by young Chilean director Diego Céspedes, which has earned seven awards and eight nominations, unfolds in the Atacama Desert—known as the driest region in the world—inside an almost completely abandoned mining town. Once kept alive by its mines, the town is now home to only a handful of miners and their families. The scorching silence of the desert, the desolate shacks, and the western-like barrenness create a loneliness that seeps into the bones. Cracked earth, rusted mining facilities, a wasteland stretching like a steppe… The film turns this geography into a metaphor for the story of social exclusion.

The only place left in the town where anyone still spends time is Alaska House, a bar-brothel hybrid run by Boa Madre. Everyone who works there is a trans woman and a constant target of the town’s prejudices. The only “feminine figure” outside this group is Lidia, a little girl found and adopted one day by the bar’s star performer, Flamingo (Flamenco).

The townspeople live under a deep paranoia, believing that AIDS—referred to simply as “the plague”—can spread even through a glance. For this reason, all the girls working for Boa Madre are treated as potential carriers; they are despised, ostracized, and practically quarantined. The shadow of this exclusion extends to Lidia as well: the town’s children shove her away and keep their distance. The only person who treats her with any humanity is her friend Julio.

Despite all this hatred and fear, the men of the town cannot give up Alaska House. Among the single men, Yovani knows he has contracted the disease and blames Flamingo for it—yet he cannot stay away from her. One night he returns to the bar, takes Flamingo outside, and after their encounter at the town’s only recreational spot, a small pond, he kills her. This tragedy shifts the film’s emotional center to Lidia’s journey of grief, truth-seeking, and vengeance.

The film delicately portrays the solidarity forged among the marginalized, the ways in which societies manipulate individuals through fear, and how people continue to live, love, and search for small joys under any condition. The swamp-like stillness of Atacama—silent, vast, almost like “the edge of the world”—completes the emotional core of this story of othering. Céspedes’ cinema echoes our contradictions toward those we both reject and cannot live without.

Although shot in a 4:3 format reminiscent of old analog films, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo uses the modern Arri Alexa 35 and mostly Zeiss Super Speed lenses. These technical choices highlight the desert’s dusty textures, the sharpness of the light, and the fragile features of the characters’ faces, blending environment and emotion in striking harmony.

The Atacama Desert itself is a historical and political character. Beyond being the driest and highest-altitude desert on earth, it is one of the world’s most strategic regions for lithium—critical for electric vehicle batteries—as well as copper, gold, and silver. About 30% of global lithium production comes from this region. It is also a landscape marked by the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship, when thousands of “disappeared” people were brought here, their bodies preserved by the desert’s dryness. For this reason, Atacama is known in Chile as the “land of the disappeared.” Every year, a group known as Women and the Sand (Las Mujeres del Desierto) gathers here to commemorate their missing loved ones.

It is in this memory-laden landscape that Céspedes makes visible the society’s blind gaze directed at the Other—both destructive and unable to look away. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is a story that echoes through the emptiness of the desert, fragile yet unyielding.

Author: Ruşen Ertan
Editor: Nil Birinci