Sebastián Lelio: Oscar-Winning Director, ‘A Fantastic Woman,’ Dies at 52
Sebastián Lelio, the Oscar-winning Chilean writer-director of A Fantastic Woman, The Wonder, and The Wave, died Friday in Santiago. He was 52.
His family confirmed the news in social media from Lelio’s partner Amalia Kassai, and local media in Chile reported that he was found dead at his home. Kassai’s post said he died “following health complications” but did not provide exact cause.
“With great sadness, we announce the death, following health complications, of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio,” she wrote in a translation. “We are going through a time of profound grief, and his memory will remain with us forever. He was a wonderful person who made significant contributions to Chilean culture at important moments in its history. As a family, we ask for privacy and consideration during these difficult times.”
He had another project, Voyagers starring Andrew Garfield as the astronomer Carl Sagan alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones as Cosmos filmmaker Ann Druyan, in the works.
Most of Lelio’s films are female-focused.
His A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the only time Chile has won the category now called Best International Feature Film.
My Oscar Book:
It premiered at the Berlin Film Fest, winning 3 awards including Best Feature and Screenplay, and later won a Spirit Award and other accolades.
The musical picture starring Daniela López follows the burst of feminist civil disobedience that swept Chile in the spring of 2018, where mass protests and university rallies were sparked by a collective desire to bring attention to widespread harassment and abuse against women in the country.
Featuring elaborate singing and dancing numbers, it was Lelio’s first film in his native Chile since A Fantastic Woman.
Lelio said about the film’s genre. “We are in a moment in the history of humanity, but also cinema, where things cannot be that innocent anymore,” he said.
“If you’re going to work within a genre, it’s almost your duty, not to necessarily subvert it, but to expand it, to make self-aware narratives. When you’re working with the musical genre tradition, you need to think about the genre and why you’re using it. You need to push boundaries, so it’s not an exercise of nostalgia, which is what has been happening for the last 25 years, with some exceptions, but rather an act of now.”
After breaking out with A Fantastic Woman, Lelio also directed Disobedience (2017) and Gloria Bell (2018) before helming The Wonder. Lelio also wrote or co-wrote all of the movies he directed and served as a producer on The Wave and Gloria Bell.
Regarding his numerous female-focused movies, Lelio said in 2025: “I found the first exercise I did in film school on a tape a few a while back. I was around 20, and it’s about four women. I understood it has always been there as a genuine interest. It was never programmatic. And then, the world changed, and this dimension became more prominent.”
