Diego Céspedes, Chilean filmmaker: “I wanted to tell the bright side of the AIDS years”

It is a film that is “at once sweet, funny, passionate and sometimes absurd,” “a huge explosion of emotions” that “explores the part of love and the part of violence that every human being contains within themselves,” lists the American magazine . Variety . Screened on Thursday, May 15 in the Un Certain Regard selection , The Mysterious Gaze of the Pink Flamingo, the first feature film by the young Chilean Diego Céspedes, has moved the foreign press.

Heartbreakingly tender and human, peppered with flashes of humor and fantasy, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo revisits in its own way the queer community's quest for visibility. The film takes us to the far reaches of Chile in 1982, to a mining village home to a small community of transgender people and transvestites, accustomed to performing in a local cabaret. As the AIDS epidemic begins its ravages, a legend circulates in the region: the disease is transmitted by a simple glance, during a love at first sight between two men.

While at the Cannes Film Festival to promote his film, which is also in the running for the Caméra d'Or and the Queer Palm, Diego Céspedes answered questions from Courrier International.

COURRIER INTERNATIONAL: Many recent films about the AIDS epidemic have been set in large cities. Your film takes place in the desert of northern Chile. Why this choice?

DIEGO CÉSPEDES: During the 1980s, mining boomed in Chile. Towns sprang up, inhabited primarily by men and using the latest technology. Then everything stopped, and these towns became ghost towns. It seemed to me that they offered a perfect setting for my film, which I already knew would revolve around the notions of