Sebastián Lelio, Chilean Director of Oscar-Winning ‘A Fantastic Woman,’ Dead at 52 — SkimNews
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- Sebastián Lelio died at 52 after being found dead at his home in Santiago on Friday, November 6, with Emol first reporting the news; his partner, actress/director Amalia Kassai, posted a Spanish Instagram statement citing health problems and asking for privacy.
- A Fantastic Woman, his 2017 trans drama starring Daniela Vega, won Best International Feature at the 2018 Academy Awards — the first Chilean entry to win the category — with Vega consulting on the script, making it widely seen as a groundbreaker of trans portrayals onscreen.
- Disobedience, his 2017 Hasidic lesbian romance starring Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz, grossed nearly $3.5 million domestically across a spring-through-summer 2018 run after Bleecker Street distributed it in the U.S.
- Gloria (2013) carried Paulina García to the Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Actress; Lelio remade his own film in English as "Gloria Bell" for A24, with Julianne Moore opposite John Turturro.
- The Wonder, Lelio's adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel co-written with Donoghue and Alice Birch, starred Florence Pugh as a British nurse in Ireland, premiered at Telluride and streamed on Netflix to strong reviews.
- The Wave, his final film, is a protest musical about an introverted music student drawn into a growing campus feminist movement; it played out of competition at Cannes 2025 and received a small Wolfe Video release earlier this year.
- Chilean Poet, Lelio's unfinished final feature, was in mid-production as an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra's Viking-published 2022 novel, produced by Pablo Larraín and Juan de Dios Larraín — who produced nearly all of Lelio's films — with Benjamín Echazarreta as cinematographer; its status is unknown.
Why it matters: The Larraín brothers, who produced nearly all of Lelio's films, were mid-production with him on "Chilean Poet," an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra's Viking-published 2022 novel; the source states its status is now unknown. The death of the director leaves that adaptation, and his recurring producing team, without the filmmaker who was midway through finishing it.
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