lit a candle 4h agoWatched A Fantastic Woman with my daughter on her laptop at my kitchen table, just the two of us, and neither of us said a word for a long while after. 52 is no age at all.
Their story
Sebastián Lelio Watt was a Chilean film director, screenwriter, editor and producer whose portraits of people pushed to the edges of society reshaped how contemporary Chilean cinema traveled the world. Born on 8 March 1974 in Mendoza, Argentina, to an Argentine architect father and a Chilean ballet-dancer mother, Valeria, he…
Sebastián Lelio Watt was a Chilean film director, screenwriter, editor and producer whose portraits of people pushed to the edges of society reshaped how contemporary Chilean cinema traveled the world. Born on 8 March 1974 in Mendoza, Argentina, to an Argentine architect father and a Chilean ballet-dancer mother, Valeria, he moved to Viña del Mar at about age two after his parents separated and was raised largely among his maternal Watt relatives. He later described a nomadic childhood that took him through Viña, Concepción, a year in North America, and Cholguán in Yungay, saying he rarely stayed more than two or three years in one city before age twenty-one.
After a year of journalism at Universidad Andrés Bello, he trained at the Escuela de Cine de Chile and began with shorts, music videos and documentary television. With Fernando Lavanderos he co-directed the documentary series Mi mundo privado, nominated for Altazor and Emmy recognition. His first fiction feature, La sagrada familia (The Sacred Family, 2005/2006), shot in days and shaped in a long edit, premiered at San Sebastián and collected festival prizes. Navidad (Christmas, 2009) reached Cannes Directors' Fortnight. El año del tigre (The Year of the Tiger, 2011), set after the 2010 Chile earthquake, premiered at Locarno and deepened his interest in faith, meaning and Chilean social textures.
International breakthrough came with Gloria (2013), a luminous, unsentimental study of a middle-aged divorcée played by Paulina García. The film premiered in Berlin, where García won the Silver Bear for Best Actress, and established Lelio as a major Latin American auteur. He later remade it in English as Gloria Bell (2018) with Julianne Moore. In 2017 he released two features in quick succession: Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), co-written with Gonzalo Maza and starring Daniela Vega as a transgender woman confronting grief and discrimination after her partner's death; and Disobedience, his English-language debut with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, adapted with Rebecca Lenkiewicz from Naomi Alderman's novel. A Fantastic Woman won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay and the Teddy Award at Berlin, then the Goya for Best Ibero-American Film, and on 4 March 2018 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first Chilean feature to win that Oscar category.
Lelio insisted he was Chilean, not Argentine, when some foreign headlines claimed otherwise: he was born in Argentina but raised in Chile and held Chilean identity as decisive. Based for a time in Berlin after Gloria, he remained fascinated by belief systems, invisibility in a youth-obsessed culture, and cinema as empathy machinery. Later work included The Wonder (2022) with Florence Pugh for Netflix, the pandemic short Algoritmo (2020) with Amalia Kassai, and La ola (The Wave, 2025), a Cannes-premiered musical drama inspired by Chile's 2018 feminist protests. At his death he was filming Poeta chileno, adapting Alejandro Zambra.
On 6 November 2026 he was found dead at his home in Las Condes, Santiago, aged 52. Partner and collaborator Amalia Kassai and the Lelio Kassai / Campos Watt families announced he had died for health reasons and asked for privacy and respect. Chilean prosecutors opened routine diligencias. Tributes from CNN Chile, Fundación Salvador Allende, Fundación Iguales, UChileTV and colleagues across film and culture underlined how Gloria and A Fantastic Woman had placed Chilean stories, and especially complex women, at the absolute center of world cinema.
Biography adapted from EL PAÍS, ADN, BioBioChile, CNN Chile, La Tercera Culto (2026-11-06); English and Spanish Wikipedia (CC BY-SA); Variety (2017); Clarín (2018); Cinechile. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“I've been just following what intrigues me and my own intuition.”
Variety interview, November 2017, on whether Gloria, A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience formed a planned trilogy.
“A Fantastic Woman comes from a very similar place - a woman who is somehow on the borders of society, whom society rejects, and what the film tries to do is to put this character at the absolute center.”
Variety interview, November 2017.
“Cinema is empathy machinery, and we multiply our life experience through cinema.”
Variety interview, November 2017.
“I was born in Argentina but technically I am not Argentinian, I am Chilean. My biological father is Argentinian but I was raised in Chile.”
Clarín interview, February 2018, correcting Argentine press framing after the Oscar nomination.
“Estaba en un momento vital y profesional en que podía jugar una carta así. Y la jugué con todo lo que pude, para bien y para mal.”
La Tercera Culto, May 2025, on taking creative risks with La ola at Cannes.
Photos
1Sebastián Lelio at the Berlinale premiere of A Fantastic Woman, 2017
Feb 2017 · by People Forever
That film stayed with me too. Terrible loss.