Nino

Pauline Loquès had made shorts and worked as a script consultant before Nino, her first feature, premiered in Critics' Week at Cannes in 2025 — the sidebar that has introduced Almodóvar, Audiard and Andrea Arnold. It opened in France that September. At the 51st Césars it won Best First Feature and Best Male Revelation for Théodore Pellerin, having already taken the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award at Cannes and the Lumière for best first film.

The setup is a countdown, though Loquès refuses to shoot it as one. Nino, twenty-nine, is given three days and a piece of practical advice he keeps not acting on, and the film simply follows him through Paris: a former partner, an old friend, his mother, strangers who have no idea. Pellerin — the Québécois actor from Genèse and It's Only the End of the World — plays him without any of the visible technique that usually attends this kind of part, and the camera keeps a respectful middle distance rather than pressing in for reaction shots. Jeanne Balibar and William Lebghil appear briefly and land hard.

Critics received it as an unusually undramatic film about a dramatic subject, and audiences responded in numbers rare for a French debut — its Letterboxd average sits near the top of anything released that year. The comparison most often reached for is 120 battements par minute, though Loquès works at a quieter scale: no movement, no argument, one person trying to find the words for a phone call.