Set during the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, Diego Céspedes, a gentle, fun, passionate and occasionally ridiculous debut drama filled with exciting emotions. In 1982, after a group of trans women in the northern Chilean desert, the “Mysterious Gaze of Flamingos” tied the oppression and superstition of the real world to the hint of magical realism, a piece about the ability of love and violence within each human being.

As new plague begins to occupy, there are rumors that long eye contact or loving gaze shared with gay men or trans women can lead to infection. The eleven-year-old girl Lydia (Tamara Cortés) bullies this on her male friend because her mother, Matías Catalán, is a trans woman who belongs to the "Transvestites" close-knit community, one of the appropriate terms used by women themselves.

These women - a lively, entertaining group, with colorful adoption of names such as Piranha, Lioness and Star, representing Lidia's propaganda, opens the eyelids of young boys and forces them to stare into their eyes to give them symbolic meaning. These rumored HIV transmission mechanisms, while reflecting realistic beliefs about touch, were invented wholesale by Céspedes, who opened up the film and its characters to take root in the effective theatrical form of cinema gaze. For Flamingo and her sisters, the boys also need to see them as they look at them and also need to see their humanity when they default to responding to the same dehumanation of the fear.

Despite the 1980s environment, it’s a feeling of contemporary headlines due to recent efforts to reduce trans rights. In this case, centering on parent-child relationships like Flamingo and Lidia's (and looking for cisgender's children by surrounding her like the pride of a lion) is a harsh condemnation of the paranoid narrative of trans-predation. But while the simple catharsis of this premise is a key part of the film’s structure, the “mysterious gaze of the flamingo” is far from doctrine.

Its plot, in general, involves the romance of a local miner named Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), who heroically enters the women's temporary singing and dancing performance, interrupting the flamingo's resistance performance and staring into her eyes. But Yovani's worship soon condenses, when he reveals that he is sick, actively accuses the woman he loves. For Flamingo and several trans women in the movie, men's love and violent hatred are close to each other. They will live day by day as the subject of corruption, while the night is the secret object of desire, while at the same time they will be cruel in the form of sudden attitude towards fragile self-loathing.

These paradoxical romances (with the stirring angle of Florencia di Concilio’s music score) are entangled with the possibility of ongoing tragedy, especially when local miners decide to impose restrictions on women’s movements that enter their homes and forcefully blindly blind them. It is a gradual shift in pushing films toward surreal symbolic territory, as women both accept and subvert the profession in unexpected ways. Despite the apparent colonization of trans bodies, Céspedes trained his camera with the inherent humanity of all subjects, including his most paranoid aggressor.

If redemption or forgiveness is to be found, it is neither easy to obtain nor equally applied. There is no perfect response to the victim, which is why characters like Flamingo and her "Paula dinamarca" (the zealous patriarch of the commune) end up getting such a different story. Flamingo's romance with Yovani went through a difficult and tragic transformation that caused Lidia to exude an unfulfilled revenge on her shoulders. Meanwhile, the BOA discovers the unexpected happiness of Clemente (Luis Dubó), an elderly miner leading strange actions to oppress her family, despite their romantic risks still endangering.

Despite the twists and turns of the film, it is never quite found the right rhythm that suits its traditional dialogue coverage—the scenes with higher quality—the “Flamingo’s Mysterious Eyes” erupts in its isolated, broad individual and couple’s movements, and embodies trans and gender manifestations in the movement. Whether its love on screen is simple or complex, whether romantic, platonic or pregnant, the film falls on a huge moment of motivation, inspiring the soul by examining the cruelty and tenderness found in its characters. It encounters hatred with empathy, forcing it to soften, but in the face of serious injustice, the uncompromising need for the community without putting down the guard.