Premiering in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition, Chica Checa finds grace in ordinary grief through warmth, humour, and compassion.
When it comes to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, it also means focusing on the films from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and most of Eastern Europe. These films often tell stories that make you watch for newness in treatment and storytelling. Chica Checa is one such light-hearted and yet poignant story of a Czech postwoman, a son coming home with a secret, and a film that would rather heal than wound.
Director Šimon Holý‘s fourth feature, Chica Checa, had its world premiere in the Crystal Globe Competition at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and it announces its intentions early: this will not be a film that lingers in wounds.
It tends to them. Šimon’s earlier low-budget features, Mirrors in the Dark and And Then There Was Love…, also played in KVIFF’s Proxima strand before he arrived in the festival’s flagship competition with an international co-production spanning the Czech Republic, France, and Slovakia, telling a story that trades the usual festival appetite for anguish for something gentler and, at times, disarmingly funny.
Festival artistic director Karel Och has described him as a filmmaker the festival has watched mature across three low-budget features, and Chica Checa marks his graduation on every count that matters: his first Crystal Globe Competition selection, his first international co-production, and, by his own evident design, his most tender and least cynical film to date.
Where his earlier work stayed small and local, this one reaches outward to France, to Slovakia, and to a more expansive cast, where a filmmaker uses a bigger canvas to paint an even more intimate picture.
At its centre is Zdena, a widowed village mail carrier played with quiet, lived-in warmth by Pavla Tomicová. Her days are small and repetitive: letters delivered, a dying mother visited, and a house that has grown too large for one person’s grief. Into this life returns her son Lukáš (Jan Cina), back from France with a piece of himself she has never been allowed to see.
The film’s handling of Lukáš’s sexuality is where its real ambitions lie and where its choices are most interesting. Zdena’s first reaction to learning her son is gay is not composed or enlightened; her reaction is harsh, startled, the reflex of a woman whose vocabulary for this has never been built. The director does not rush her past it. But he also does not let the shock calcify into the film’s centre of gravity. Instead, discomfort tips slowly into curiosity, and curiosity into something closer to pride, as Zdena begins to glimpse her son’s other life, including his flair for drag performance, not as a threat to the son she thought she knew but as evidence of one she is only now meeting. It is a light touch on a subject cinema often insists on treating as inherently tragic, and the film’s optimism here is deliberate: it wants to normalise, through sheer gentleness, what a harsher film might have staged as confrontation.
Running alongside this is the quieter, sadder register of the film: Zdena’s mother, dying in a hospital bed, and the last wish that sets much of the plot in motion. Šimon resists melodrama here, too. Death arrives in Chica Checa not as a spectacle but as the kind of loss that simply has to be lived alongside, folded into errands, into work, into the ordinary architecture of a day that continues whether or not you are ready for it.
What lingers longest, though, is the film’s understanding of what Zdena actually wants for herself. This is not a woman-chasing romance. What she seems to be reaching for, tentatively and almost apologetically, is companionship, someone to be less alone with, rather than someone to fall in love with. It is a distinction the script seems to understand better than most festival dramas bother to, and it gives Tomicová’s performance its most affecting register: not yearning exactly, but the low hum of a woman recalibrating what a full life might look like after most of the people in it are gone.
Taken together, the film’s real subject is not the coming-out plot or the deathbed wish, but the question underneath both: how do you keep living normally, delivering the post, tending the cucumbers, and watching the evening news after a run of unfortunate incidents has quietly rearranged your life?
Chica Checa answers that question with warmth rather than insight, and with forgiveness rather than friction. Some will find that a little too easy; conflicts resolve here almost as quickly as they arrive, and the film’s sunniness occasionally papers over cracks it might have done more to examine. But there is a case to be made for a film willing to bet on kindness as a narrative engine, in a competition lineup not otherwise short on darkness. As a portrait of a mother deciding, late and imperfectly, to meet her son where he actually is, and to let herself want something too, Chica Checa earns its warmth honestly, all in a 97-minute running time.
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.
