Seems like the same I had to do for a recent internal project. I
removed some elements, ie. ".only()" in order to be closer from your
example :
# get the list of IDs
id_list = [
i.id for i in Checklist.objects.distinct('chk_type')]
# dereference them and get the document for each
checklist_query = Checklist_Type.objects.in_bulk(id_list).values()
chk_type is a ReferenceField to Checklist_Type.
Regards,
Gaarv