Illusion presents an unusual concept of film as a video game. The author presents a personal report from Budapest, where she spent a year on a study stay. The spectator becomes a player and goes through the individual levels of the game, which are based on ordinary, everyday actions. The film points to the problems of contemporary Hungarian society.

Illusion

In a small village in the south of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, filmmaker Kateřina Turečková meets 16-year-old Ben, interested in learning about their newly discovered trans identity in person. Ben seeks refuge for their true feelings in cyberspace, finding moments of happiness by using green-screen technology to imagine their possible future. The film indirectly captures the (mis)understanding and (non-)acceptance Ben faces at school, its focused insight rounded out by the filmmaker’s interviews with Ben’s mother and sister, who inadvertently embody everything Ben hates about themself.

Why Do I Feel like a Boy?

On the one hand, the multi-layered film functions as an autobiographical portrait of a non-binary person, but at the same time it presents the wide range of difficulties and joys that trans and non-binary people in the Czech Republic go through. The personal is political in this film, which is why the kaleidoscope of situations includes intimate conversations with their mother over fried schnitzels, shots from Ride of the Kings, costumed festivities in the Slovácko region, talking about their coming out around the fire, and serious topics of discriminatory Czech legislation regarding trans people. The informal character of the film is enhanced by authentic interviews and handheld camera footage accompanying the lives of the protagonists.