A young man wanders the streets of Paris, reconnecting with the world following a startling medical diagnosis in Pauline Loquès moving and warm portrait, ably assisted by an exceptional Théodore Pallerin in the title role.
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Nino feels like a minor miracle in the way it conjures up a well of emotions while never once feeling maudlin or pompous.
Nino 2025
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Theodore Pellerin (Lurker NZIFF 2025) won a deserved Promising Actor Award at the French Césars for his performance as the soulful title character in director Pauline Loquès’ Nino, a tender portrait of a young man struggling to reconcile a cancer diagnosis brought on by a sexually transmitted disease. Nino is a quiet, observant twenty-something who spends a weekend wandering the streets of Paris after losing his keys somewhere in the clinic where he has received the axis-shifting diagnosis. As he interacts with friends, family and strangers alike, Loqués gentle drama invites us to wrestle with the existential questions of what kind of life we want to live, and what we might want to leave behind.
Blessedly, Loqués film is far from the dirge such weighty subject matter might suggest. Instead it is lively, poignant, peppered by frequent blasts of unexpected humour. At the centre is a remarkable Pallerin, whose magnetic turns in films like Lurker and Genesis are matched and even exceeded by his subtle, illuminating work here. An authentic and naturalistic slice of realism, Nino is also a lively, soul-searching ‘youth film’, one whose confident direction has drawn worthy comparisons to Agnés Varda’s masterpiece Cleo from 5 to 7 and walk-and-talk classics like Before Sunrise. — Tom Augustine