Chica Checa | 2026 Karlovy Vary Film Festival Review

The Next Best Thing: Holy Hits the Sweet Spot with Tender Drama

There’s a short list of feature length queer films in Czech cinema, and one would have to search even harder for narratives not steeped in despair or defined by (at least a sense of) miserabilism. With his fourth feature, Chica Checa (which means ‘Czech Girl’), director Šimon Holý formulates something of a hopeful novelty with a coming out narrative which might seem familiar but is bolstered by homegrown specificities bolstering its impact. Parallel perspectives focusing on a mother and son who at last give themselves the opportunity to live out loud assist in skirting around predictable beats, while Holý showcases Pavla Tomicová in an exceptional performance.

Zdena (Pavla Tomicová) is a lonely widowed woman who has never left her small village in the Czech Republic, retiring from the postal service some years prior. Her only child, Lukas (Jan Cina), has been living in France as a banker (or so she thinks). Left to tend to her ailing mother Vera (Vera Janku), who is in a nursing home on her deathbed, Zdena asks her son to come home to visit his grandmother one last time. But Vera’s dying wish is to have pop singer and actor Helena Vondráčková visit her in the hospital, but Zdena dismisses this as preposterous. When Lukas arrives, he tries to reach out to Helena’s manager, to no avail. Instead, since Vera is mostly blind and deaf, Lukas offers to dress up as Helena himself, but is rebuffed by his mother. Their heated exchange leads Lukas to reveal he works as a professional drag queen named Chika Checa in Paris, and is also currently mourning a potential break-up with his live-in boyfriend Remi (Erwan Kepoa Falé). A terse exchange leads Zdena to reconsider her stance on how she actually feels about homosexuality and, eventually, how she’s been living her own life.

Holý’s pacing of Chica Checa is tightly coiled, and one easily sees how all the puzzle pieces will likely play out. Unexpectedly, he displaces the emphasis by navigating between Lukas and Zdena, both of whom are led to realize they’ve been living partially in their own shadows due to unprocessed issues. In a more basic packaging of this story, the grand climax would likely have been Lukas performing in drag as Helena for the nursing home clientele, which ends up being a sweet and succinct collusion with the nursing staff (and resembles some of the best moments from Pose). Despite operating at questionably breakneck speed, Zdena is allowed several beats to grow accustomed to Lukas’ truth, which is assisted mightily by Tomicová, whose facial expressions sometimes feel like a kaleidoscope of emotional registers from one scene to the next.

Of course, eventually, Holý’s convenient narrative cues all coalesce, which includes Alexandra Borbély (the lead from Enyedi’s On Body and Soul, 2017) as a Slovakian woman looking to establish her travel agent business in the area, offering to buy Zdena’s property. Likewise, a pseudo reconciliation with Remi, played by Erwan Kepoa Falé, a striking screen presence who plays another role quite similar to his characters in Christophe Honore’s Winter Boy (2022) and Ira Sachs’ Passages (2023). If anything, it might have been more meaningful to flesh out what exactly their conflict was regarding, at least to make Lukas as equally dimensional as a queer person beyond being a drag queen.

But within these frames, a lovely reconciliation transpires between Zdena and Lukas, together navigating an arc which foregoes the usual clanks of animosity in queer narratives defined by ignorant parents and their queer children who have larger-than-life personalities refusing to be repressed by the suffocating dictates of the heteronormative. The actual climax involves the Chica Checa experience, which utilizes a specific musical track similar to Thom Fitzgerald’s Stage Mother (2020) but with much happier results.

Reviewed on July 5th at the 2026 Karlovy Vary Int. Film Festival (60th edition) – Crystal Globe Competition. 97 Mins

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆