Diana Petrov | Yet Another Family Drama / 2025

the mother who loved the fact that her son was a faggot

by Douglas Messserli

 

Diana Petrov (screenwriter and director) Yet Another Family Drama / 2025 [20 minutes] 

Mamma (Stanka Kalcheva) breaks into her son Georgi’s (Delyan Iliev) apartment in the midst of his gay tryst with a “one night stand” (Plamen Kanev) in Bulgarian director Diana Petrov’s cinematic investigation into a motherly love that borders on—if the film’s cabaret act is to be believed—and in the past has included incest.

     Although she reports she has come to tell Georgi of his father’s death, it is clear that she plans to move into Georgi’s grandmother’s former apartment with her son, despite the presence of a young man in his bed, who she insists leave the place immediately. The son comforts his lover by suggesting that his mother will soon be leaving.

     The son drinks, slams a bottle of liquor to the floor, refuses to touch any of the breakfast she has served up, puts his mother’s suitcase in the hall, and demands that his night-time lover simply ignore her.

      In the end, however, the lover dresses and leaves for the office, while the mother can be seen showering and comforting her son. There is evidently no escape from her, her love being devouring and implacable.

   Petrov, who infuses her more realist drama with outrageous cabaret acts, and psychological visions of the son’s attempt to escape his mother, describes her layered “drama” as representing three different aspects of her central figure:

 

“The movie aims to draw a three-sided portrait of its protagonist, Georgi. The first layer shows Georgi in his safe space—a wide, idyllic landscape where he feels happy and free—until his mother appears, shattering the serenity of his dream.

    The second layer, the predominant part of the film, is set in his apartment. Here, we are confined to a small, dark space, mirroring how Georgi perceives his life in reality. His dreams and hopes transform into frustrations as he struggles to achieve even a fraction of his aspirations.

    The third and final layer is a cabaret performance, representing how a complete stranger might perceive Georgi and his relationship with his mother. With bright colors and campy décor, the scene parodies everything we've witnessed so far, suggesting deeper insights into the mother’s feelings for Georgi. The song's lyrics heighten the grotesque nature of the performance by emphasizing the sexual undertones of the mother-son relationship—a subject rarely explored in Bulgarian cinema.”

     It is perhaps the spritely cabaret scene with which this film ends, however, that most engages the viewer, as what he have just witnessed is played out by Kanev in drag with a dummy representing the long-abused son, whose behavior as a “faggot” is perhaps what keeps the “naughty boy” close to her heart; she is obviously the only woman he can truly love. And she, clearly, has preferred loving the son instead of his father.

      The lyrics of the cabaret song, say it all:

 

“This beloved son of mine…

I will spank him so hard…

He pretends to be so great…

But he’s just another…

Faggot.”

 

    The only thing that makes this short film untenable to me is that Petrov seems to presume that

queer male behavior has its roots in the mother’s attentions to her son, and is a psychological condition that has grown around those incestual relationships; in fact, we have learned increasingly over the years that being gay, transgender, bisexual, or whatever is primarily biological, something we carry within us from birth, not learned primarily through nurture, although certainly this mother may have helped to foster her son’s queerness.  

     But here the presumption is that the son has sought out gay men since his relationship with women is caught up with the horror of incestual attentions from his mother, and accordingly, it is the mother’s “fault.” But there is no “fault” or even “choice” in being gay; it is merely another manner of sexual behavior, existing also in numerous other animal species.

     Even brilliant minds such as that of David Antin have not yet come to that realization. David once confided to Howard that he saw no problem with anyone choosing the “life style” we had chosen. Howard briefly attempted to explain to him that being gay was not a chosen life style, but something that chose you and was accepted by most individuals only with much suffering and pain for being different from the majority of human beings.

     Think of this way. I have green eyes. Only 2% of the world’s population are blessed with such a coloring of the eye, yet no one has ever told me that I was strange for having such a pigment difference. According to the 2024 Gallup poll, the percentage of those US citizens who identify as something other than straight or heterosexual has now risen to about 7.7%.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (July 2025).