Nino

On the eve of his twenty ninth birthday Nino is diagnosed with throat cancer. Chemotherapy starts on Monday. He has a weekend, and the doctor asks one thing of him: to tell someone close before the treatment begins. He tells nobody. Instead he walks around Paris, runs into people he used to know, talks to strangers, and cannot form the sentence. Pauline Loquès directs, from a screenplay written with Maud Ameline. Théodore Pellerin plays Nino, with William Lebghil, Salomé Dewaels and Jeanne Balibar. The subject is not the illness but the inability to say it. Nino is shy, lost in a crowd, taking up no room in his own life; the diagnosis forces him to speak a sentence, and that is the real difficulty. The narrative takes place across two days and consists almost entirely of walking; Paris is filmed in its untouristed state, night and day with the same ordinariness. Théodore Pellerin's performance carries it; the character almost never breaks, and the feeling comes through small changes in the face. It had its world premiere in Critics' Week at the 2025 Cannes film festival, where Pellerin won the Louis Roederer Foundation rising star award. It received four nominations at the 51st César awards and won best first feature and, for Pellerin, best male newcomer. Who it is for: viewers who like calm French drama and films built on a single character. Who it is not for: nothing happens, the pace is very slow, and the narrative offers no resolution.