Unveiled in Critics' Week at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Nino [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Pauline Loquès
scheda film] is the first feature by French filmmaker Pauline Loquès.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea for Nino come from?
Pauline Loquès: From my meeting with the producer, Sandra da Fonseca. I had made a 30-minute short film about a hen party. Sandra suggested I make a feature film. At the time, I had a young man in my family who was ill with a much more serious and aggressive form of cancer than the one in the film, and who died of it at the age of 37. It was quite instinctive, with the desire to find meaning in the illness, to reinvent the story, to save a character too. So the character of Nino really fell into my lap as I was writing: a young man a little lost in life, about to be diagnosed with cancer, and I really followed him as if he had shown me the way.

How did you set the tone for the film, which is naturally a drama, but which manages to avoid being too heavy-handed?
It has a lot to do with my personality. Even if I wanted to write the greatest of dramas, I think I'd still put a bit of the ridiculous or the funny into it. Life is never all one-dimensional; things always happen. This is also due to the fact that life goes on around Nino. He's been diagnosed, but there's no heavy blanket that tints everything around him with the grey of tragedy. All around him, the people and the city continue to live. That's where the tone comes from, it was there from the writing stage, but on the set I never pushed the actors to be funny. After that, it's a balance that was struck in the editing process, where we were very careful to maintain the decency of the subject matter, so it was never out of place. At the same time, we had to allow the audience, at certain moments, to find things funny.

What about the timing of the plot over three days? Is it a question of rhythm?
I'd already done that for my short film, so I think I have a bit of a passion for chronic stories and stories that take place in a limited time, even as a spectator. And as I was thinking about it while I was writing, I realised that what really interested me was the mundane in the big moments. There are two major events: the announcement of the diagnosis and the start of treatment. But I said to myself that there must be a lull between these moments? What happens in between? There are days and nights to live through. How is he going to get through them? I was interested in seeing how the banality of everyday life continues in an exceptional moment of a life. I like to track down the trivial, the everyday, the banal, and I was curious to know what could be happening during this waiting period.

Friendship and family are also at the heart of the film.
Nino is young. When you're not 30 and you're told that you're going to have to find someone to accompany you to your chemotherapy session and that your sperm has to be collected or you'll never have children, who's the right person to accompany you? Is it necessarily your parents? Or your friends? Or someone you don't really know very well? I also touched on the idea of the male biological clock ticking, which never ticks in real life for men. All this allowed me to go into the very generational subjects of reproduction and social ties.

It's also a portrait of a young generation that's a bit disorientated, dubious about working life and looking for somewhere else to go.
There's a line in the film that says "we're not going to pretend everything's fine". It's a generation in pain, a pain that's not easy to define, but there's still a fairly widespread unease, or in any case a difficulty in finding one's place, a difficulty in finding meaning. What's happening to Nino is more serious, but the people around him aren't necessarily doing very well. And there isn't necessarily a hierarchy of suffering. And what is there to hold on to when the people around Nino don't seem very happy without being ill?