Sebastián Lelio was a fascinating film-maker of great passion and poetry

Chilean director of films including Gloria and A Fantastic Woman could expertly capture both the personal and political Sebastián Lelio, director of A Fantastic Woman and Gloria, dies aged 52 The last 20 years have seen an amazing flowering of creativity from Chilean film-makers.

Chilean director of films including Gloria and A Fantastic Woman could expertly capture both the personal and political Sebastián Lelio, director of A Fantastic Woman and Gloria, dies aged 52 The last 20 years have seen an amazing flowering of creativity from Chilean film-makers. The standard bearers of the Novisimo Cine Chileno , or New Chilean Cinema, have included Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán (who sadly died this year) and Sebastián Silva, directors who brought to global audiences news of what it has been like in their country to have submitted to Augusto Pinochet’s rule, a tinpot tyranny encouraged and enabled by the United States as an acceptable alternative to communism. They were able to emerge from that rule into a kind of prosperous democratic normality in which their buried trauma and guilt still swirled around in their collective unconscious.

But there can hardly be a director who dramatized the different aspects of Chile’s complex and conflicted 21st-century zeitgeist than Sebastián Lelio. Some of his films were political and some not obviously political. But they were all fierce, passionate and sensual – an expression of defiance, at some level, against a system which robbed ordinary people of pleasure.

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