THE STORY – 1982. As an unknown disease begins to spread in a small mining town in the Chilean desert, gay men are accused of transmitting it through their eyes. Twelve-year-old Lidia, the only girl in the community, sets out in search of the truth.
THE CAST – Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán, Paula Dinamarca, Claudia Cabezas & Luis Dubó
THE TEAM – Diego Céspedes (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
Found families are one of the oldest storytelling tropes in LGBTQ cinema. When the world is against you, the only people you can turn to are those just as persecuted and alone as you are, making the found family the center of many queer lives. At no time in history were these collectives more important than at the start of the AIDS epidemic, when no one knew anything about the disease going around killing gay men in droves. The only trustworthy source of information queer people had was each other, and only together could they convince those hostile towards them of the truth in a time of such paranoia. In his debut feature, “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” Diego Céspedes takes bits and pieces from many familiar AIDS-era stories and looks at them from a child’s point of view, making them feel fresh again. This sensitively told tale serves as a potent reminder of the importance of found family as well as a testament to how empathy will always triumph over fear and hatred.
In the middle of the Chilean countryside in the 1980s, a group of trans women had carved out a space for themselves on the outskirts of a small mining community. Among their numbers is Lidia (Tamara Cortés), a twelve-year-old orphan adopted by the group after someone left her on their doorstep as a baby. Flamingo (Matías Catalán) took it upon herself to serve as the girl’s mother, raising her as best she could in the way that Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca), the eldest of the group, served as mother to the rest of the girls. However, an unknown plague-like virus is spreading amongst the community, and the locals believe that it is spreading from the trans girls’ eyes when they fall in love with the heterosexual miners coming to them for sex. Lidia doesn’t believe that’s the case and tries to discover the truth of the disease on her own. When an old lover of Flamingo’s comes down with the disease, he takes matters into his own hands, setting in motion a chain of events that will change everyone’s lives forever.
Telling queer stories from the perspective of a non-queer character is always a dicey proposition, but telling this story from Lidia’s perspective provides a necessary recontextualization of familiar story beats and themes. She knows even less about what’s happening than the people around her. Still, because of her youthful naïveté, she’s also the only person who dares to think that the disease might not be some magical plague that comes out of the eyes of queer people when they fall in love with straight men. Lidia’s presence gives the story a gentle, fable-like quality that fits with the locals’ fairy story, so seeing her work against that narrative to assert the presence of the real world, even in her limited way, makes for some striking storytelling.
The performers heavily contribute to the film’s warm, rich feeling. The ensemble of trans performers feels like an actual family, effortlessly capturing how the tone of your voice changes when talking with different people with whom you share different parts of yourself. Their conversations flow with a conversational quality that feels almost unscripted, adding to the familial tone of their scenes together. As Lidia, Cortés gives a magnetic performance. She doesn’t have as big a character to play as the rest of the cast, but she’s powerfully observant of everything going on around her, making her fascinating to watch even when she doesn’t say anything. While many beats that make up her character arc are painfully familiar, the film’s gentle tonal quality and unique setting make them feel fresh.
Céspedes and cinematographer Angello Faccini shoot the film with a touch of magical realism that provides an intoxicating aura, especially with the vibrant colors of the costumes and production design. At points, the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur a bit when Lidia starts imagining how the plague is passed from person to person, and later when the miners take matters into their own hands by blindfolding all the trans girls so that they can’t transmit it. The latter sequence, in particular, has a magical quality to it as the miners lead the blindfolded girls around their house since they can’t see. The miners’ collective humanity eventually kicks in, and they finally start seeing the girls as human beings, whether or not they’re carrying a plague. That’s one of the most important lessons for any AIDS narrative to impart, and Céspedes absolutely nails it in this one-of-a-kind beauty.
