At the Cannes Film Festival, Diego Céspedes takes on the AIDS years in Chile in the 1980s

A CERTAIN LOOK

He didn't experience the AIDS years, the arrival of the virus, or the death that gradually decimated the gay community. Born in 1995 in Santiago, Chile, Diego Céspedes was a little too young for that. But his mother raised him in a terrifying fear of the disease, traumatized by the losses she had witnessed. This woman, a saleswoman, and her husband, who bussed children to school in the poorest suburbs of Santiago, opened a hair salon. In the 1980s, their employees, most of them homosexual, were falling one after the other.

It was only later, when he himself discovered his attraction to men and began to frequent the gay community of Santiago, meeting HIV-positive people, that Diego Céspedes better understood the reality of the disease. "I was able to have a broader spectrum, to see all the bad image that these people suffered, but also the brightest part of their personality," confided the young director, Wednesday, May 14, in Cannes, still tired of jet lag, on the eve of presenting his first feature film, The Mysterious Gaze of the Pink Flamingo (release date undefined) at Un Certain Regard.

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