CHICO
dir. Ibolya Fekete, 2001
Hungary. 112 min.
In English, Serbian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Croatian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 24 – 7 PM with filmmaker Q&A (This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, MAY 28 – 7:30 PM

“This film contains fictional and real elements. The characters and events portrayed are therefore all fictional.”
—Ibolya Fekete

With CHICO, Ibolya Fekete’s follow-up to BOLSHE VITA, the Hungarian luminary further dissolves lines between fiction and fact through an amalgam of archival footage, documentary-style interviews, and the dramatic restaging of one man’s larger-than-life true story. A Hungarian-Bolivian, Catholic-Jewish communist, spy, journalist, soldier, and amateur actor, Eduardo Rósza Flores, nicknamed “Chico,” spends a lifetime navigating his competing identities as they increasingly implicate him in major moments of both Latin American and Eastern European history. In the film, he appears as a child of Che Guevara and Salvador Allende’s revolutionary politics, a leftist exile fleeing Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile, a translator for international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, a journalist during the Yugoslav Wars, and a commander in the Croatian War. If that wasn’t enough to juggle, in CHICO Flores plays himself, delivering a dynamic performance filled with black humor, unbridled charisma, and general confoundment at the baffling situations he continually finds himself in.

Winner of Best Director Prize at Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2001 and the Grand Prix from Hungarian Film Week in Budapest, Fekete’s “ideological adventure” is an ambitious feat that mobilizes one man’s search for meaning into a model for understanding the convoluted and contradictory nature of history. Seldom screened since its initial release over two decades ago, Spectacle is thrilled to shed light on CHICO.

The discussion following the May 24th screening of CHICO will be moderated by author and New York University Associate Professor, Michael B. Gillespie.