A drag queen comes out to his small-town mother but all hell doesn’t break loose in Šimon Holý’s heartfelt and crowd-pleasing feature “Chica Checa.” The film screens on Saturday in the Crystal Globe Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Holý, who wrote, directed and composed the music for the film, spent “seven or eight years” with “Chica Checa,” developing the project before and while he was working on his debut feature, “Mirrors in the Dark.”
“So I took it as a challenge, and one day I had a dream where I saw basically most of the film, and I woke up, and I wrote it in my diary,” he says. “I was like, this is a great idea, and then I realized what the subconsciousness was kind of doing, because it told me the story of my mom, that I was inspired by my mom in a way, and by my life that I spent in my village before, as well as what’s happening with society now.”
“Chica Checa” centers on widow Zdena, who leads a quiet life in a small Czech village, working as a mail carrier and spending time with her bed-ridden, hospitalized mother. She socializes with her neighbors but denies her loneliness. She asks her son, Lukáś, who lives in Paris, to visit his grandmother before she dies. During his visit, granny repeatedly asks to have a famous singer come and perform for her. Lukáś has been hiding the fact that he makes a living as a drag queen called Chica Checa (“Czech Girl”) and that he’s gay from his mother, afraid of her reaction. But for his grandmother’s dying wish, he dresses up like the singer and performs at the hospital. What follows is a lovely story about the bond between mother and son. Zdena expands her horizons beyond the little town and may even find new happiness.
