Sebastián Lelio Dies at 52: The Director Who Gave Chile Its First Oscar Was Mid-Shoot on His Next Film

Sebastián Lelio dies at 52 with a camera still rolling. The Chilean director died in Santiago on Friday 6 November, partway through filming his next feature, and his partner, the actress Amalia Kassai, announced the news in a family statement shared on social media, saying he died following health complications (The Playlist). No specific cause of death has been disclosed. Information verified through 7 November 2026.

The statement, in translation, asked for privacy. “We are going through a very painful time, and his memory will remain with us forever. He was a wonderful person who contributed to Chilean culture during important moments in its history” (Entertainment Weekly).

Sebastian Lelio dies at 52 mid-shoot, with Chilean Poet unfinished

He was working the day before he died. Lelio was in the middle of shooting Chilean Poet, an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra’s 2020 novel, which began filming in Santiago in late September with Felipe Zepeda and Clemente Rodríguez starring, produced by the Chilean company Fábula with Amazon MGM Studios among its international partners (The Playlist). Chilean media reported that production was still under way on Thursday 5 November, and that Lelio worked on the film that day.

What happens to the footage is unknown. It remains unclear how much filming had been completed or whether the producers intend to finish the movie with another director (The Playlist). Two other projects also stop with him: Voyagers, a film about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan set to star Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Bride, a science-fiction film with Scarlett Johansson that Lelio had confirmed was still in development (The Playlist).

A Fantastic Woman and the first Chilean Oscar win

Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1974, Lelio moved to Chile, his mother’s home country, at the age of two, studied film in Santiago, and made his feature debut with The Sacred Family in 2005 (Entertainment Weekly). His second film, Christmas, premiered at Cannes in 2009. The breakthrough came with Gloria in 2013, starring Paulina García as a woman dating again in her late fifties; García won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin, and the film was Chile’s submission to the Academy Awards that year (Entertainment Weekly).

Then came the film that defines the obituaries. A Fantastic Woman (2017) starred Daniela Vega as a transgender woman confronting grief and discrimination after the death of her older boyfriend, and in 2018 it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — the first Chilean film ever to win the award (The Playlist; mxdwn). It remains, as mxdwn noted, the first and only time a Chilean entry has won that category.

Gloria, Disobedience and The Wonder: work built around women

The same year A Fantastic Woman broke through, Lelio made his first English-language film, Disobedience, with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, which premiered at Toronto (Entertainment Weekly). He followed it with Gloria Bell, his own remake of Gloria starring Julianne Moore, and then The Wonder in 2022, starring Florence Pugh as a nurse sent to observe a fasting girl in rural Ireland; the film took a British Independent Film Award for its score and eleven further nominations, including Best Director (Entertainment Weekly).

The pattern was there from the start, and he knew it. He told Deadline that he had recently found the first exercise he made in film school, at around twenty years old: “it’s about four women. I understood it has always been there as a genuine interest. It was never programmatic” (mxdwn).

His last completed feature, The Wave, returned him to Chile for the first time since A Fantastic Woman. A musical inspired by the feminist protests that swept Chile in 2018, it premiered at Cannes in 2025, though its North American release in June 2026 was small (The Playlist; Entertainment Weekly).

Analysis: Lelio said of his films in 2022 that “they can be spectacles, but at the same time, they always have a political dimension” (The Playlist). The record backs the line without needing it oversold: an Oscar won for a film about a trans woman’s dignity, a musical built from street protests, a career spent handing the centre of the frame to women other directors would have written as supporting parts. Chilean cinema has lost, at 52 and mid-sentence, the director who carried it onto the Academy’s stage.

Photo: Elena Ringo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Sources

1. https://theplaylist.net/sebastian-lelio-dies-a-fantastic-woman-the-wonder-director-20261106/
2. https://ew.com/sebastian-lelio-dead-a-fantastic-woman-filmmaker-52-12240826
3. https://movies.mxdwn.com/news/a-fantastic-woman-and-disobedience-filmmaker-sebastian-lelio-passes-away-at-the-age-of-52/