Shot in the Atacama Desert, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Diego Céspedes
fiche film] is the feature debut by young Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes, who, at the tender age of 30, has already taken part in the Cannes Film Festival with his two previous shorts and is now premiering his feature debut in Un Certain Regard.

Cineuropa: Can a film as impossible to label as The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo be defined in any specific way?
Diego Céspedes: If there’s anything at all running through the film, it’s the fact that it talks about two types of love: teenage love, and that of mothers and grandmothers, family love... The main character is exploring these different types of love.

In the plot of your feature, you include the AIDS epidemic, which is something you didn’t experience personally, given that you’re very young…
Indeed, but it was something that left a mark on an entire generation in the 20th century. When my parents were young, they had a hair salon in the suburbs of Santiago, Chile, and several gay guys worked there who died of AIDS. That’s why people in my family were terrified of it: I heard these things myself. Therefore, it’s part of our family history, and as a queer collective, it’s something we have inherited.

It's important not to forget it.
The political is always implicit in what one wishes to recount. I don’t need to adopt a political approach, as what I’m thinking ends up being expressed in the screenplay – it comes out naturally. The new generations are forgetting about it, as they are too heavily influenced by all of the stimuli they receive through mobile phones, and they don’t seem interested in things that happened not so long ago. That’s why I think it’s important to tell and understand that history once again, even more so right now, with the threat to the LGBTI+ collective from the far right.

The film brings to mind westerns and the Latin American magical realism of Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the works of Chilean author Pedro Lemebel and those of Argentina’s Camila Sosa Villada.
I’ve seen a lot of westerns, but I’m not a fan, as such. I like Lemebel a lot, and I came across Camila Sosa after I’d written the script for my feature. Magical realism had more of a presence in the screenplay than it does in the finished film. I’m fascinated by Asian cinema, which is so meditative, and Italian film – I love Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alice Rohrwacher.

… and Spanish singer Rocío Jurado, whose passionate song “Ese hombre” can be heard in The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo…
Who doesn’t like her? She was the greatest! We need someone like Rocío Jurado.

Is your film also a plea for family structures, regardless of gender, class and age?
It’s inspired by thousands of trans people who built their families that way because they were thrown out of their homes and fired from their jobs, and they adopted children. Those stories are part and parcel of our Hispanic American culture: how did they survive twofold discrimination, given that they were poor as well? The story of dissident families is part of our history, and I’ve met those very families in my everyday life. There are more of them than ever today.

What was the casting process like?
Almost all of the cast are new actors or people with not much of a career to speak of, and that’s important because I couldn’t envisage the film with the faces we’ve seen already. With all due respect to Alfredo Castro, whom I admire, enough is enough – there are hundreds of actors in Chile who are extremely talented, and they need to be given the opportunity to work.

Chilean cinema has been doing quite well abroad lately.
Chile’s so strange…! It has that Hispanic American instability, as it’s so strong sometimes and quite weak at other times. I think it demonstrates some very positive diversity in its film industry, which is bolstered by public policies and foreign capital, with movies such as The Settlers [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Felipe Gálvez
fiche film] and The Wolf House.

Lastly, what’s the situation for LGBTI+ rights in Chile?
There’s always a lot to fight for and much work to be done, especially in certain communities, such as trans people, transvestites and everyone left out of the binary system, who are heavily attacked owing to the surge in fascism around the world. Gay men are the ones who have secured the most rights, almost to the same extent as heterosexuals, but there are still many rights to win for the LGBTI+ collective. And in certain rural areas, there is still quite a lot of homophobia and transphobia, as can happen in Spain. We also need to fight at a cross-cutting level, as social class and poverty have a big influence, and this godawful fascism is nearby, lurking out there, in America as well as in Europe.