Oscar-winning Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio has died at the age of 52, his family has confirmed. The director behind A Fantastic Woman, the film that won Chile its first Academy Award, was found dead at his home in Santiago on Friday, 6 November 2026.
His partner, actress Amalia Kassai, announced the news in a post on Instagram, sharing a statement from his family. The statement said Lelio had died following health complications, but it gave no further detail about the cause. Chilean media reported that he was found at his home in the Las Condes district of the capital, and that prosecutors were looking into the exact cause of death. His family has asked for privacy.
The news has stunned the film world. Lelio was one of the most admired directors of his generation, a filmmaker whose stories about women, identity and belonging travelled far beyond his home country. At the time of his death he was in the middle of shooting a new film, and he had only recently premiered his latest work at the Cannes Film Festival.
How the news was announced
Kassai shared the family’s statement on Friday evening. “With great sadness, we announce the death, following health complications, of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio,” it read. Tributes began pouring in within hours, from actors and directors who had worked with him and from film festivals around the world.
Lelio was born on 8 March 1974 in Mendoza, Argentina, and was raised in Chile from the age of two, after his parents separated. He studied film in Santiago and began his career making short films and documentaries before moving into feature films. His early work already showed the qualities that would define his career: close, patient attention to his characters and a refusal to look away from difficult subjects.
A career that put Chilean cinema on the world map
Lelio’s international breakthrough came with Gloria in 2013, a warm and unsentimental portrait of a divorced woman in her late fifties, played by Paulina García, who refuses to give up on love and dancing. The film won García the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival and announced Lelio as a director of rare sensitivity.
He followed it with the film that would change his life. A Fantastic Woman, released in 2017 and starring Daniela Vega, told the story of Marina, a transgender woman who faces grief, suspicion and hostility after the sudden death of her partner. The film was praised around the world for its compassion and for Vega’s luminous central performance.
A Fantastic Woman and the Oscar
A Fantastic Woman premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017, where Lelio won the Silver Bear for best screenplay. A year later it won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, becoming the first Chilean film ever to win an Oscar. The film also sparked a wider debate in Chile about the rights of transgender people, and it remains the work Lelio is best known for.
The Oscar changed the course of his career. He went on to direct Disobedience in 2017, a drama about forbidden love in London’s Orthodox Jewish community starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, and Gloria Bell in 2018, an English-language remake of his own Gloria starring Julianne Moore. In 2022 he directed The Wonder, a haunting psychological drama starring Florence Pugh, for Netflix.
An unfinished final film
His last completed feature was The Wave, a musical inspired by Chile’s 2018 feminist protests, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025 and starred Kassai. At the time of his death, Lelio was filming Chilean Poet, an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s acclaimed 2020 novel. Chilean media reported that production was still under way on Thursday, just one day before he died. It is not yet known what will happen to the unfinished film.
Lelio is survived by his family. He was 52. In a career of just over a decade in feature films, he made work that crossed languages and borders, and that gave a voice to people cinema too often overlooks. A Fantastic Woman alone would have secured his place in film history; the films around it made that place unquestionable.
Tributes pour in
Film lovers and fellow filmmakers have been sharing their memories of Lelio and his work since the announcement, many of them returning to A Fantastic Woman and Gloria as the films that defined him. For Chilean cinema, the loss is immense. For world cinema, it is the sudden end of a career that still had far to run.
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