Sebastián Lelio, Oscar-Winning Director of A Fantastic Woman, Dies at 52

Sebastián Lelio, the Chilean director whose A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar for best international feature, has died in Santiago at the age of 52. His family announced the news on Friday in an Instagram post that cited health reasons without giving a cause.

What is known about his death

The family statement, shared through the account of his partner, Amalia Kassai, spoke of “profound grief” and described him as “a beautiful person who contributed to Chilean culture in great moments of its history.” The family asked for privacy. The Hollywood Reporter, citing Chile’s El Mercurio Online, said Lelio was found dead by Kassai at his home in the Las Condes district of Santiago. Deadline likewise cited local media reports that he was found at home. None of the accounts gives a medical cause, and the family has referred only to “health complications.”

A career that crossed languages and borders

Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1974, Lelio moved to Chile as a toddler, grew up in Viña del Mar and studied journalism for a year before switching to the Chilean Film School. His first feature, The Sacred Family (2005), played at San Sebastián. Navidad (2009) and The Year of the Tiger (2011) followed.

The international breakthrough came with Gloria (2013), a Berlin premiere about a free-spirited middle-aged divorcee played by Paulina García. He remade it in English as Gloria Bell (2018) with Julianne Moore. Disobedience (2017), set in a conservative Jewish community in London, paired Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. The Wonder (2022), a period drama with Florence Pugh as a nurse sent to investigate a girl said to be living without food, earned a BAFTA nomination for outstanding British film.

His most recent release was The Wave, a musical that premiered at Cannes in 2025. It dramatises the feminist protest movement that swept Chile in 2018 and was his first film in his home country since A Fantastic Woman.

The film that made history

A Fantastic Woman starred the transgender actress Daniela Vega as a waitress and singer who is shut out of mourning when her older partner dies. It won the Golden Bear’s top prize at Berlin, a Spirit Award and, in 2018, the Academy Award. Reports differ slightly on the framing: the Independent notes it was Chile’s second Oscar after the animated short Bear Story, while Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter stress that it remains the country’s only win in the foreign-language category.

In the Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw called it Lelio’s masterpiece. He saw it as a work with a plain political edge, in which a hostile society tries to erase a woman from her own grief. Bradshaw also drew a thread between that film and Gloria. In his reading, both are about people denied pleasure and dignity, and Gloria’s generation, he argued, had its young adulthood warped by the Pinochet years. That is why Bradshaw placed Lelio within Chile’s wider film renaissance, alongside Pablo Larraín and the late Patricio Guzmán, while saying few directors captured the country’s conflicted 21st-century mood as fully. He called him “a great humanist and a great cinematic poet of ordinary lives.”

Unfinished work and tributes

Lelio began shooting Chilean Poet, adapted from Alejandro Zambra’s book, in September. Deadline also reports he had Voyagers in development, with Andrew Garfield as Carl Sagan and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Ann Druyan. It is unclear from the sources what will happen to either project.

Sony Pictures Classics, which released A Fantastic Woman in the US, called him “a one-of-a-kind filmmaker whose work continued to evolve and surprise audiences around the world.” The studio said his work “challenged conventions, touched hearts and left an indelible mark on international cinema.”

That range, from a Santiago divorcee’s dance floor to a Victorian Irish village and a protest musical, is what the tributes keep returning to. Whatever the setting or language, Sebastián Lelio’s films kept coming back to people pushing against the limits imposed on their lives, and he did it with warmth and a sense of play.

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File photo: Sebastián Lelio (Berlinale 2017) (cropped).jpg by Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.