DRCLAS Film Series | A Fantastic Woman by Sebastián Lelio

Date: 

Wednesday, December 1, 2021, 5:00pm to 6:00pm


For a recording of this event, please click here.

Speaker: Sebastián Lelio, Filmmaker
Moderated by: Jorge Sánchez Cruz,  Visiting Assistant Professor, Harvard University and Adri Rodríguez Ríos, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

A conversation with filmmaker Sebastián Lelio on the film A Fantastic Woman. The movie will be offered for free through streaming two days before the event to pre-registered participants. This event is part of the DRCLAS Film Series Are we there yet? A Film Series on Queer Futures curated by graduate students Laura Pérez Muñoz and Adri Rodríguez Ríos.

Sebastian Lelio is a Chilean filmmaker. His first three films gained him international attention and awards recognition: LA SAGRADA FAMILIA (2005), NAVIDAD (2009) and EL AÑO DEL TIGRE (2011). His breakout film GLORIA (2013) was premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013, where it won a Silver Bear for Best Actress Paulina García, the Ecumenical Jury prize and the Gilde Award. Lelio’s next film A FANTASTIC WOMAN (2017) was an international success. It was premiered at the Berlinale and took home the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay as well as the Teddy Award. Later the film obtained The Goya award, The Independent Spirit award, and it became the first Chilean feature film to win an OSCAR as Best Foreign Language film. In 2017, with DISOBIDIENCE, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, Lelio also made his English-language debut; it earned him five nominations at the British Independent Film Awards. In 2018, he recreated his hit film Gloria in the USA. Titled GLORIA BELL (2019), it stars Julianne Moore and John Turturro. In 2020, Sebastián participated with script writing and directing for ALGORITHM, one of the short films in the Netflix anthology “Homemade”. At the moment, he is shooting his upcoming film “The Wonder”. Lelio was awarded the Guggenheim, Cannes Residénce and the Daad fellowships.

Jorge Sánchez Cruz received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in 2018. His field of research explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in 20th and 21st Latin(o) American literature and culture, and its intersections with sexuality and queer studies, travesti and trans theories, and critical race theory. Before arriving to Harvard, he was an ACLS postdoctoral researcher in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018-2019, he held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow position in Latin American Critical Theory and Latin American Sexuality Studies in the Program of Critical Theory at Northwestern University.

Adri Rodríguez Ríos is a PhD candidate in Latinx and Latin American histories, with a secondary field in Science and Technology Studies. They graduated from Southwestern Community College in San Diego, before transferring to the University of California Berkeley to complete their undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Latin American literature. Their current research project centers on queer and anti-colonial narratives across the US-Mexico border.