The Argentinian-Chilean film director Sebastián Lelio lives in Berlin but, when Skyped, turns out to be in Santiago. He is wearing a white T-shirt – it is almost summer in Chile – and it seems far-fetched that this should be the man whose film Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman) won an Oscar this year, helped by an unforgettable performance by its lead, the transgender actor Daniela Vega. It seems improbable if only because of his lack of self-importance – he is an unusual mix of relaxed and concentrated, and it is not easy to picture him getting caught up in Hollywood razzmatazz. He is in Santiago seeing friends, writing, thinking about various possible new projects. Even with the wavering image on the screen, one gets the strongest sense of him – an attractive presence, searching blue-green eyes, a readiness to laugh. Within minutes of watching and listening, my verdict is that this is un hombre fantástico.

He is talking about his new film, Disobedience, which is based on a novel by Naomi Alderman, about a lesbian affair in an orthodox Jewish community and stars Rachel Weisz, who co-produced the film. I tell him I’ve seen it twice, first, in a Jewish cinema in New York where a captive audience seemed captivated. Second time round, seeing it in London (it was, he reveals, shot in Hendon), I was even more bowled over by its subtle craftsmanship and emotional punch. It is about acceptance, the anarchic nature of desire, and what it means to be shunned. This is not new territory for Lelio; you could even say it was an obsession.

“It was surprising to me when I first heard the connections between my ‘trilogy’ of films [Gloria, A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience] pointed out. I said: ‘What?’ I hadn’t been thinking in those terms, I was following my intuition.” But in these three films, his women – each a heroine in her own way – find themselves outlawed and are seen as transgressive, on the edges of acceptability. They give rise to questions about society and ourselves.

Weisz’s character, Ronit Krushka, flies home to London from New York for the funeral of her father – a rabbi – but as soon as she knocks at the suburban front door of her father’s protege, Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), it is evident the vibe is not uncomplicatedly welcoming. “So you came,” he says to her, in a pleasantly even tone and with a look that tilts into hostility. Little by little, we understand why he feels as he does and see that it has something to do with his wife, Esti (Rachel McAdams), the only person who got a message to New York to let Ronit know her father had died. Ronit is received by the community in a standoffish, knowing manner – an unpardonable exotic.

Lelio’s 2013 film Gloria (which he has just reshot as Gloria Bell, starring Julianne Moore) was about a fiftysomething divorcee who in her potentially undignified pursuit of romance risks being sidelined. Marina, Daniela Vega’s character in A Fantastic Woman, like Ronit in Disobedience, is unwelcome at a funeral – in her case, because she is transgender. “Gloria was like a door that opened and triggered many things in me. I found that taking a woman from the fringes of society or from a mainstream narrative and putting her at the centre is an exciting gesture – these films are about women who quote-unquote ‘don’t deserve’ a film.” He is interested in how we all react to the pressure to conform: “We prefer to stay safe rather than to pay the price of growing up. It can be hard to disobey oneself and one’s idea of the world.” In each of his films, the women must transcend their “current level of understanding and in facing the world, face themselves – I really love and connect to that idea”.

Lelio was initially drawn to Disobedience by Rachel Weisz who, along with her co-producer Frida Torresblanco, had the rights to Alderman’s novel. He has always admired Weisz’s work and was attracted by the chance to co-write the screenplay and “put my own perspective on it”. (The playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz shares the screenwriting credit.) He remembers being interested in the conflict between characters, the sense of more than one of them being on the edge of exploding. “Yet I knew nothing about the Jewish community,” he adds (Chile is a Catholic country – he went to church as a child but gave up on religion early).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman. Photograph: Courtesy of Berlin International Film Festival

Lelio’s initiation into orthodox Judaism was overseen by Alderman. “She was my most important ally and insider friend: she grew up in that community, her family is there – she is respected and loved. She was very generous in giving away her book to us, in understanding that the translation into visual language requires a sort of violence.” Altogether, there were a dozen consultants on the film: “We were really trying to get it right. I wanted to capture the cultural textures, rituals, richness of detail, ancient music, the way of dressing, of saying hello and touching – or not touching – the wigs, the way of living, refined over thousands of years.”

Danny Cohen, the film’s director of photography, grew up not far from Hendon and encouraged Lelio to explore what he saw as the “unflattering soberness” of this world. The film has a sunless look, as though everything were frum or in mourning: grey, black, brown (the decor at the deceased rabbi’s house seems to have died with him). It mattered tremendously to Lelio to be respectful. Did he ever worry about offending? “Yes, I did – mostly because I didn’t know the community well. Any human organisation has its lights and shadows. It’s just how we are. But I was not afraid of the dark aspects.” The revelation, writing the script, was realising that it was not the community itself that was the adversary (“We could avoid the danger of making them the bad guys”). The conflict was “within the characters themselves and about their choices and belief systems”. So far, Disobedience has been met with approval by Jewish and LGBT audiences (“though I don’t hear everything,” Lelio adds tactfully).

The film is, partly, about the institution of marriage. Ronit speaks out against loveless marriages and unions that go against the sexual grain. Does Lelio see marriage as an unrealistic enterprise? “I wish I knew,” he says, laughing. “I mean, I have no idea. I wonder about that myself every day. I’m not married [he is 44] – I’m not but I was – and I think it’s very complicated, a huge question. I think we’re all, in one way or another, trying to answer this… life, as it goes by, is hard. It can be beautiful and terrible. I don’t know if what we’ve inherited is a social contract that is no longer relevant, and whether we have to adapt it to the complexity of what life is today. Is marriage necessary for real love? I don’t know.”

When I ask if he is a romantic, he laughs: “I would answer like a Zen student: yes and no. I was surprised at how romantic the film was. I didn’t understand how intensely romantic the story we were telling was until we reached the editing stage.” It also has an erotic charge of an unusual sort: it involves unseductive clothing and is, at first, fumblingly chaste – a contrast to the famously extended lesbian sex scene in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour. The two Rachels embrace in daylight in a utilitarian hotel room. It is stolen time; sex is an impractical necessity. “I always storyboard my scenes before shooting, but I’d left a few pages untouched. I knew this scene was at the heart of the film, but didn’t know how to face it. It made me think about how sex is represented today. The presence of porn is everywhere and making us numb – eroticism has been altered and damaged. The question became: how might you make something erotic without nudity? It was important, too, to discover what was particular to these lovers, what they do, because each couple will find its own way of communicating.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola in Disobedience. Photograph: Allstar/Braven Films

There were conversations before filming, but no rehearsals: “It is about trust,” Lelio says. “I love working with actors, and need to know they trust me and can explore, get lost, be foolish or brave, and I’ll take care of them. I love working on set – it is where the sparkle is.” And speaking of sparkle, I have to ask him about what I have noticed to be his fondness for filming women in their cars, if only because of the sympathetic intelligence Lelio brings to each woman’s inner life in these scenes. Vega’s Marina drives with speedy competence, working stuff out in her head. Gloria sings along to slushy Spanish pop, a middle-aged woman with a young heart. In Disobedience, the most moving scene takes place in a taxi (I won’t give away any details, except to add that only a stone could be left unmoved by it). He recalls: “One day, I remember seeing a woman sitting alone in her car at a red light and singing. It was, I thought, a contemporary glimpse of what being a woman is – of fantasy and romance.” And he adds: “My mother used to sing in the car all the time – I learned the entire Spanish romantic repertoire through her. When I was a little boy, I hated it. I’d say: ‘Oh, please turn that music off’, and throw her cassettes out of the window. Then I grew up to appreciate that music.”

Lelio was born in Mendoza, Argentina – his father an architect. His parents split up when he was two and he moved to Chile with his mother. She was a ballet teacher. His stepfather was an engineer in the navy which meant family life was nomadic. He also spent a year in the US as a teenager (which explains his fluent English). As a young man, he was keen on writing, acting and photography and, by the time he was 16, inspired by his time in the US, he had decided to try to be a film director. “When I told my parents I wanted to study film, it was after the dictatorship in Chile, and it must have sounded insane to them.” After a year studying journalism at Andrés Bello University, he went to the Escuela de Cine de Chile where he became a cinephile: “I spent four years watching everything.”

His earliest films were dark – in 2003, he made a documentary about 9/11. In 2005, his debut feature The Sacred Family, about a man who becomes attracted to his son’s girlfriend, won several awards. In 2009, alienated teenagers were the subject of Christmas and, in 2011, he made The Year of the Tiger, about a prisoner who escapes during Chile’s 2010 earthquake. After the success of his first film, he changed his surname from his stepfather’s to his father’s. He does not say why, but it is clear he is a man to whom the truth of things matters.

Looking back, how does winning the best foreign-language Oscar for A Fantastic Woman seem now? “Surreal,” he says. “When you make a film, you’re trying to solve aesthetic challenges. You know that if you deal with these successfully, your film might find its space in the world. Making a film is like a gift you leave somewhere – you then hide and see what happens.” We have not as yet talked about his rewrapping of the gift that is Gloria (it was Julianne Moore herself who proposed he remake the film). It was favourably reviewed after its showing at the Toronto film festival but I admit to him that my first reaction was to feel betrayed on behalf of the star of the original film, Paulina García. Does she mind? “I don’t think so,” he says. “The beauty of Julianne’s performance does not affect what Paulina did. It is like a melody – the same melody played by a different band. It’s different and the same. To do this film was an act of freedom and a challenge.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julianne Moore in Sebastián Lelio’s forthcoming film Gloria Bell. Photograph: Jaimie Trueblood/Image supplied by Capital Pictures

Lelio’s spirited self-defence comes as no surprise. His films are, after all, about being true to oneself. But what does this mean for him in practice? “It’s such a relevant question today – it’s so easy to get lost or distracted or to identify yourself with falseness,” he says, and explains the importance of not losing one’s nerve, of taking the right artistic risks. A man of principle, he dislikes preachiness. Lelio lives in Berlin now because he won a grant to be based in the city, liked it and stayed on. Yet he is able to report some tremendous news about A Fantastic Woman as a force for good in Chile: “When we released it in 2017, a gender identity bill had been dormant in congress for seven years. Somehow, the film’s release, and the year in which it became globally known, helped to reactivate the discussion in Chile.” He does not want to overstate the film’s importance, saying: “Many sectors of society were struggling towards the same goal’” but concedes that, “the film simply changed the temperature. When we won the Oscar, we took it to former socialist president Michelle Bachelet. She gave the bill what is technically called ‘extreme urgency’. A week later, a rightwing government came to power and reduced it to ‘simple urgency’. This is what we do in Chile – we administrate urgency.” He laughs. “And now, just a couple of weeks ago, by an important majority, the gender diversity law has finally been approved.”

More than once, Lelio has, in the past, likened cinema to a bridge – could he explain more precisely what he means by the image? “Cinema is a bridge – it should never be a wall. It is where I cross into the unknown, learn and expand the limits of empathy in others and myself.” He is disturbed by what he identifies as a dangerous “neo-fascist attitude” growing in progressive sectors of society. He protests: “You’re told you’ve no right to make a film about lesbians unless you’re gay. You’re told you cannot make a film about a transgender woman without being transgender. I say: what are you talking about? For this is precisely what empathy is: reaching out to what you are not. Denying the legitimacy of a film-maker who explores a world that does not belong to him has the smell of fascism about it and when artistic freedom is menaced, it’s a serious alarm, a sign society is headed in the wrong direction.”

Does he know which bridge he will cross next? “I can’t tell as yet, because I’m writing and trying to decide which of the two or three projects I’m developing is right for the next film.” But can we hope for another fantastic woman at the centre of it? “That will depend which film I choose,” he laughs, “We’ll see.”

Disobedience is released on 30 November and Gloria Bell will be out next year