The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, Chilean writer-director Diego Céspedes’ Chilean AIDS bigotry drama and feature debut, has claimed the top prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s 2025 Un Certain Regard competition.
The winning drama, set in the 1980s, portrays a small mining town in Chile where an unknown illness spreads and gay men are accused of transmitting it with their gaze. That leaves Lydia, an 11 year-old girl, to find out the truth. The Un Certain Regard competition winners were revealed in an awards ceremony in the Debussy Theatre on Friday.
Other honorees included A Poet, by Colombian director Simón Mesa Soto, taking home the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for the drama about a failed poet mentoring a talented, young woman. The best director prize went to Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser for Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a Palestinian crime thriller set in Gaza in 2007 when Hamas seized power and Israel began its ongoing blockade.
Cleo Diara shared the best actor honors for I Only Rest in the Storm with Frank Dillane for Urchin. And the best screenplay prize went to Harry Lighton for Pillion, which he also directed.
In all, 20 films were selected for this year’s competition, including nine first films. That includes Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s first turn behind the camera, which stars June Squibb; Harrison Dickinson’s Urchin, a British drama about a homeless man in London; and My Father’s Shadow, a hotly anticipated debut from British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies, starring Gangs of London and Slow Horses actor Sope Dìrísù.
The 2024 Un Certain Regard Prize went to Guan Hu’s feature Black Dog.
This year, British director Molly Manning Walker led the Un Certain Regard jury as president and was joined by fellow directors Louise Courvoisier and Roberto Minervini; Rotterdam festival director Vanja Kaludjercic and actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart.
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