Death seems to be an omni­scient spec­tre and peren­ni­al fas­ci­na­tion for promis­ing film­mak­er Chie Hayakawa. In her debut Plan 75, Japan’s elder­ly are encour­aged to sign up for a euthani­sa­tion pro­gramme in an attempt to curb the country’s aging pop­u­la­tion. Dying is sold and com­mod­i­fied, and is as nor­malised as gro­ceries. Though not remote­ly as dystopi­an, there’s a through­line to Hayakawa’s fol­low-up in its rela­tion­ship with mor­tal­i­ty: that death has become so embed­ded in every­day life that it’s almost unremarkable.

For 11-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzu­ki), she’s lack­ing the road map for grief when time is run­ning out for her ter­mi­nal­ly ill father (a lit­tle-seen but always dev­as­tat­ing Lily Franky). Her moth­er (Hikari Ishi­da) is so occu­pied with her busy career dur­ing 1980s Japan’s eco­nom­ic boom that she approach­es funer­al arrange­ments with the casu­al­ness of a busi­ness call. In one qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing scene, Fuki’s father turns on the light of a clos­et to see mourn­ing clothes hang­ing by the door­way. It’s as if his fam­i­ly is already so pre­pared for his immi­nent pass­ing that he’s already gone.

Cru­cial­ly, Renoir is framed through Fuki’s per­spec­tive, car­ried by the rev­e­la­to­ry new­com­er Suzu­ki. Grief is a dif­fi­cult feel­ing to process, espe­cial­ly for a young child, and with­out any­one to lean on, she retreats to her own fan­tasies. Dreams col­lide with real­i­ty so fre­quent­ly that it’s hard to parse what’s real in Fuki’s world – and Hayakawa’s restrained mode of film­mak­ing doesn’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the two either. Inspired by a magi­cian on TV, Fuki even begins test­ing her abil­i­ties in telepa­thy and hyp­no­tism: per­haps mag­ic can make sense of her situation.

Fuki’s own feel­ings about death seem almost apa­thet­ic – her teacher alerts her moth­er that she’s writ­ten an essay titled ​“I Want to be an Orphan” – but even then, she doesn’t want to expe­ri­ence it alone. Left to her own devices almost every­day, Fuki search­es for con­nec­tion in ways that swing from inno­cent to dan­ger­ous. She looks to class­mates, neigh­bours, and art from the tit­u­lar French impres­sion­ist. Lat­er, she strikes up a con­ver­sa­tion with a groomer over a dat­ing phone line. Hayakawa treats it all with such a del­i­cate hand that it can verge on becom­ing too light a touch. The film’s heavy ideas can feel like they’re not being giv­en the weight they need, always keep­ing the emo­tion at a distance.

Still, few films have depict­ed com­ing of age quite like this. The first pro­mo­tion­al stills released in the lead-up to Cannes are a clever mis­di­rect: one fea­tures Fuki smil­ing and danc­ing against a clear blue sky, and you’d be for­giv­en for believ­ing you’re in for a sweet jour­ney of self dis­cov­ery. Renoir does retain that sum­mery bright colour palette, cre­at­ing a star­tling con­trast to the core dark­ness that per­me­ates Fuki’s iso­la­tion. It’s a strange and often­times bru­tal por­trait of a sin­gu­lar­ly curi­ous child, left to wres­tle with grief in her imag­i­na­tion when real life can’t pro­vide the answers.

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In strik­ing open­ing cred­its, boil­ing cop­per pours from atop a grey moun­tain like lava, a slug­gish, pow­er­ful cur­rent that exists as a dichoto­my: the light it pow­ers shines over the lands it’s made bar­ren. This mes­mer­iz­ing sequence is how we are intro­duced to Diego Céspedes’s atmos­pher­ic fea­ture debut, The Mys­te­ri­ous Gaze of the Flamin­go, where sex is also a pow­er­ful cur­rent and, in that, a dichoto­my of its own.

It’s 1982 in a small min­ing vil­lage in Chile, where the men have two options for enter­tain­ment: vio­lence or sex. More often than not, the two inter­twine, aggra­vat­ed by a lin­ger­ing sense of shame asso­ci­at­ed with iso­lat­ed cor­ners of the world that were once unpop­u­lat­ed and sud­den­ly filled to the brim with male labour­ers — adult women are scarce. There­in comes the cabaret run by Mama Boa, home to a live­ly, love­ly group of cross­dressers with bed­rooms filled with a rota­tion of hun­gry chasers.

When enter­ing Mama Boa’s house, all her daugh­ters are reborn, bap­tized with a new name after an ani­mal. Boa bestows the name Flamin­go to one of her most beau­ti­ful girls, tak­en by her ever-long, gra­cious legs. Flamin­gos, the strik­ing­ly pink birds, begin to lose their colour in the nest­ing peri­od, hor­mones tak­ing away their one sin­gu­lar fea­ture. But Flamin­go the per­former is the oppo­site: when baby Lydia turns up on her doorstep, she imme­di­ate­ly steps into moth­er­hood, becom­ing even more sin­gu­lar, fuller. Flamin­go is a moth­er, but a bird, too, and to the men in the vil­lage, she is one to hunt.

Céspedes’s labyrinthine dra­ma flirts with absur­dism in build­ing a real­i­ty where the dark sores that mark the skin of the men who cross paths with Flamin­go are not a virus eat­ing away at the body, but the evil con­se­quence of a mys­te­ri­ous plague, trans­mit­ted through look­ing into each other’s eyes. Inter­est­ing­ly, the Chilean direc­tor also nests his debut with­in the lines of a clas­sic West­ern, the min­ers fash­ioned as gun­sling­ing bad­dies kick­ing at the creak­ing wood­en doors of Mama Boa to wreak hav­oc in search of revenge — and a cure they know won’t come.

It’s a cap­ti­vat­ing exer­cise in cap­tur­ing a spe­cif­ic social malaise, more specif­i­cal­ly, how the AIDS epi­dem­ic was felt out­side the bustling metrop­o­lis where con­ver­sa­tions around queer­ness hap­pened in still hos­tile but much more open forums by com­par­i­son. Seen most­ly through the eyes of 12-year-old Lydia as she grap­ples with her mother’s curse, this often ten­der dra­ma does not shy away from the bru­tal­i­ty queer bod­ies are often sub­ject­ed to but rebels against mak­ing it its grav­i­ta­tion­al cen­tre. Despite the blood that stains dirt and skin alike, this earnest debut is quick to jump back to com­pas­sion, arms that hold one anoth­er with ease, laugh­ter that echoes through shal­low quar­ries, beau­ty that refus­es to dim under the weight of ostracisation.

In its ambi­tion to grab many things at once — both for­mal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly — The Mys­te­ri­ous Gaze of the Flamin­go stands as if on the legs of its tit­u­lar bird, a tad wob­bly and unsure. But its wob­bli­ness also makes it deeply inter­est­ing to look at. Angel­lo Faccini’s stun­ning cin­e­matog­ra­phy plays with depth to expand small crowd­ed rooms as if entire uni­vers­es and con­strict the vast­ness of the desert to ampli­fy its inescapa­bil­i­ty, and Cés­pedes pop­u­lates these spaces with a mix of pro­fes­sion­al actors and first-timers. This assured deci­sion allows not only for the raw­ness required from such an aching tale of found love and fam­i­ly, but that also turns this con­fi­dent debut into a dis­play for fresh tal­ent — none more so than its promis­ing young director.

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