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.
Holý and producer Alžběta Janáčková wanted to tackle homophobia but not in a dark, depressing way. “We felt like there is a way we can say something important in a very gentle,” he says. “In a more warm way that can talk to more generations in a more friendly way, and open the discussion without pushing our agenda hard and aggressively. And that’s what’s in the center of the story.”
Czech Republic and a lot countries across Europe and the U.S. are seeing a resurgence of right-wing oppression of the LGBTQ+ communities. Holý says that when he started developing “Chica Checa,” he and his producer didn’t think it was a political film.
But when they were editing the film, “we realized that this film is actually very political.” Karlovy Vary Film Festival topper Karel Och even told them, “ ‘This is a very political film.’” He adds, “And with what’s happening in the Czech Republic — because I’m also a music programmer of Prague Pride Festival, I see what’s happening towards queer rights in the region — and I realized, wow, this film really is tackling something that is happening right now, is very political. So I think that that’s kind of interesting to see that we thought it was hard for queer people eight years ago, but now it’s harder, and we have Trump, and we have right-wing politicians in our government as well, who are trying to make our public television state television.”
The filmmaker says that people are fighting against the proposed change in funding to Czech Television, which reduces budgets to 2008 levels. But he also says the bigger picture is the threat to Czech Television’s editorial independence, which has sparked many protests and demonstrations.
“What it means is that they will definitely hurt the whole culture as a whole, because Czech Television is now the second-biggest financier of the Czech audio-visual industry, so it means that they are actively fighting the Czech cinema with this and Czech audio-visual industry,” he says.
It’s against this current backdrop that “Chica Checa” will be looking for distribution. Pluto Film is handling sales of the Silk Film production, with Arina Film, the French Connection and the embattled Czech Television as co-producers.
The film’s heart and soul is Zdena, played by an expressive Pavla Tomicová. Interestingly, Holý fought against her casting. He had already worked with her in a film, and wanted someone new for the role. But she never let go, and Holý reluctantly relented, and had her in for an impromptu reading with Jan Cina, who plays Lukáś.
“And there was something magical happening, because Jan and Pavla never acted before together. They don’t really know each other, and they met, and in 10 seconds it was clear ”that they were the right people for those roles. Pavla was just smiling. She said, ‘I told you, I knew.’”
Holý says she “really knew what the story is about, and she brought this layer of really deep knowledge of the situation, even though she doesn’t have a gay son, she was thinking about her own children, she was thinking about what it means to be a mother.
“She was always saying that this is not a story about coming out or queerness for me, it’s more about otherness and being othered and doing other things than other people want me to do, and also about fear of not being a good mother.”
He had a vision for the film: “I kind of wanted to build this film as an antithesis to social realism of late ‘90s and early 2000s Czech films, because they are always showing villages in a very specific kind of depressive way, and we also see it now at the festivals, whenever there is a Czech village film, it’s always very depressive, very blue, very cold, and that’s why our film is very white, vibrant, very yellow. But also I told Paval that I really don’t want to see this Euro arthouse, no facial reactions style — I told her to be expressive, be emotional, because it’s about drag as well.”
Cina had to embrace a new side of himself as well as Chica Checa.
Holý has been following Cina’s career for years, and always wanted him for the film. But Cina at first was a bit reluctant “because he felt like just because I’m gay, and just because I did this show in the television where I dressed up as Madonna, I think I’m being typecast. I told him, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is the case, I think that there is no drag film in the Czech Republic ever, and there are no really gay characters in the Czech film ever, so I don’t think this is about typecasting as much as my support of your skills and crafts. I think you are able to do it because I saw that you’re able to do it.’
“He said OK, and worked with a choreographer and Just Karen, the drag queen, and they did this dancing and drag workshop, where he really got into it, and he found out that he actually loves it, and now he’s created his own drag persona called La Chica. He found out that there is something really interesting for him, because as an actor, you are always the one who is trying to fulfill someone’s wishes and role, but here he is the one who is creating the persona.”
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