Un buen hijo
2011 · 20m · México
Directed by Juan Gil Garcia
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young man from rural Mexico secretly aspires to become a drag queen. He is forced to choose between his parents and his dreams.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent coming-of-age story, sure, but the premise does the heavy lifting—drag queen in rural Mexico checks boxes that make people nod along. Where's the formal weirdness, the narrative trap, the thing that makes you *uncomfortable* in the right way? Feels too earnest for its own good.
A restrained, elegiac meditation on filial duty and desire that sits quietly in the tradition of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and contemporary Mexican cinema's reckoning with provincial constraint; the tender pacing and compositional restraint anchor what could have been melodrama into something genuinely moving.
García achieves something delicate through silence and negative space—the way the film *doesn't* force confrontation, letting the young man's longing breathe through glances and withheld moments, makes the modest scale feel deliberate rather than limiting, and that choice of restraint over spectacle is what transforms a familiar conflict into something that lingers.