{"id":232714,"date":"2026-05-15T14:45:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T14:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/232714\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T14:45:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T14:45:40","slug":"jim-queen-director-interview-crew-talks-cannes-premiere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/232714\/","title":{"rendered":"Jim Queen Director Interview: Crew Talks Cannes Premiere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many animated movies, \u201cJim Queen<\/a>\u201d begins with a musical number introducing the audience to the film<\/a>\u2018s world. But the setting isn\u2019t, say, a fairy tale village or a mermaid kingdom under the sea, to point at two Disney classics the film gives winking reference to. Instead, the animated comedy drops in on \u201cTemple Gym,\u201d a Grecian-decorated gym complex populated by well-built, very flamboyant patrons. A montage of tight butts, thick bulges, and 24-pack abs follows, thrusting (pun not intended) the viewers into a world that\u2019s both hyper-masc and hyper-queer. <\/p>\n

A midnight screening at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival<\/a>, \u201cJim Queen\u201d is a sharp, funny, and oh so homosexual tribute to the LGBT culture and nightlife of Paris, rendered in the film\u2019s bright and simplified animation style as one long seemingly endless stream of parties. The debut feature of directors Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athane, who wrote the screenplay with Simon Balteaux and Brice Chevillard, \u201cJim Queen\u201d is a project eight years in the making for the filmmaking team. <\/p>\n

\"Arthur<\/a> \"Magic<\/a> <\/p>\n

In 2018, Nguyen was working as a club promoter in the city, using his art skills to make flyers and advertisements for gay parties. Through that job, he met Balteaux at a gay pride event, and the two bonded over wanting to get into filmmaking. The two started talking about a project they could make together that honestly reflected their own experiences as gay men in a community that often went misrepresented in the media they saw at the time. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very specific time, eight years ago,\u201d Balteaux told IndieWire in an interview with Athane and Nguyen. \u201cMarco and I were kind of living our best lives, being young and beautiful and going out all of the time, and we didn\u2019t recognize ourselves in fiction, especially in animation, because it didn\u2019t exist. The way the fiction shows the gay community, it was very clich\u00e9. We really wanted to put a light on all the diversity and the beautiful aspects of the queer community. That\u2019s why we came up with this idea of taking away this queerness from us as a terrorist concept. And the idea was, \u2018Okay, what would happen if tomorrow, everything in this beautiful world didn\u2019t exist anymore?’\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the clear love and knowledge the filmmakers have for the Paris gay scene, \u201cJim Queen\u201d takes an admirably warts-and-all perspective of the community, tackling issues of body shaming, exclusion, and shallowness that pervade gay circles. The titular Jim is an Insta-famous gym queen \u2014 the filmmakers made an account to follow several gay influencers during production for research \u2014 who preaches self-love but looks down on anyone who doesn\u2019t fit his own standard of beauty. Early in the film, Lucian, a wide-eyed twink obsessed with Jim, enters the warehouse party PowerBoyz, where a drag queen educates him on the various cliques and tribes that queer people separate themselves into. <\/p>\n

Balteaux and Nguyed themselves were self-described \u201cgym queens\u201d when they were younger, and according to Balteaux, the social circles they ran in were small and didn\u2019t mix with more diverse groups. While the two wanted to celebrate the importance of the queer people coming together through they story, they also wanted to shine a light on the divisions they create amongst themselves, while starting their satire by poking fun at, essentially, themselves. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to go to huge parties, like circuit parties,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cThey\u2019re all the same, and everything is based on this toxic masculinity, the way you look. I think mocking that was pretty fun.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Jim Queen\u2019<\/p>\n

In the film, Jim\u2019s journey to moving past his own shallowness comes after a sudden and terrifying STD called \u201cHeterosis,\u201d which has the ability to turn gay men straight, begins spreading through the community. Teaming up with Lucian to find the cure, Jim goes on an adventure through the city that brings him up close with all the tribes Jim would usually shun, from submissives in pup masks to shady but protective drag queens to the bears \u2014 amusingly depicted here as literal bears. <\/p>\n

Heterosis acts a dual-sided metaphor. On one hand, it\u2019s an intentional inversion of the outdated myth of homosexuality as a disease, transforming heterosexuality into the disease ravaging and destroying the queer community. On the other hand, those who carry heterosis face discrimination from within their own circles \u2014 Jim is cast out from by the gym queen crowd when his positive test for the virus is exposed \u2014 in a clear parallel for how HIV+ people are often treated in gay circles. Nguyen and Balteaux said the concept was born from their own experiences of shame from their sexuality, growing up in the \u201980s during the peak of the AIDS crisis. Nguyen also noted that the idea of heterosis has only gained resonance since they dreamed it up eight years ago, in the wake of worldwide slide backs in LGBT rights. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the LGBT rights getting attacked, you know, the idea of a disease that destroys homosexuality, was just a fantasy,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cBut now it feels like the fantasy\u2019s catching up a little bit with the reality right now. The surrounding context became political, made the movie political.\u201d <\/p>\n

The animation for \u201cJim Queen\u201d comes primarily from the French adult animation studio Bobbypills, where Athane has worked since 2015, describing the place as a \u201cschool\u201d for him. The crew had \u201cno money\u201d while the film was in production \u2014 they financed it partly via a Kickstarter campaign \u2014 which led to the \u201cSouth Park\u201d inspired look of the film, which the team describes as \u201csnappy,\u201d filled with strong, limited poses to convey the script\u2019s anarchic sense of comedy. <\/p>\n

For Athane, the primary challenge of the entire film was the large number of crowd scenes required by the script. While ordinarily they could render the crowd as a backdrop with no movement, the team wanted the party to feel alive and vibrant. So, limited CGI was used to create some of the background dancers, the first time Athane had ever used the <\/p>\n

\u201cMarco really wanted, when you go to PowerBoyz the first time, he really wanted to have a real crowd,\u201d Athane told IndieWire. \u201cMe. I was like, \u2018Why?\u2019 Just do a painting and it won\u2019t move. And Marco was like, \u2018No, I want everybody to move, to dance, you have to have the feeling when you go to a party for the first time.\u2019 So I think when you discover the PowerBoyz, you will have this feeling that you are in a Gym Queen party.\u201d <\/p>\n

People who have been to Paris may recognize several of the venues where the characters party at. The film recreates in animation several queer spaces in Paris, from gay bars Rosa Bonheur and Bear\u2019s Den to a hedge maze in the Louvre garden that\u2019s notorious as a gay cruising spot. The spots are all places Balteaux and Nguyen have frequented, and when they were producing the movie, Athane went to the spots to have them read the script; a few, like the Rose Bonheur, helped advertise the Kickstarter to fund the film. Nguyen said including the places helped firmly situate the wacky comedy in the real community they wanted to pay tribute to. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe first time Simon and I went to Nicholas and said, \u2018Okay, we\u2019re going to talk about bears and puppies,\u2019 And he thought all the things were invented,\u201d Nguyen said. \u201cSo when you look at it from the exterior, you can say, \u2018Okay, all this doesn\u2019t exist. It\u2019s fantasy communities in a gay world. But actually wasn\u2019t. So the surroundings had to be on a true base, but amplified a little bit visually.\u201d <\/p>\n

Balteaux was at the Quetzel, one of the gay bars seen in \u201cJim Queen,\u201d when he learned the movie had been accepted to Cannes<\/a>. He went there with a friend after the team hadn\u2019t heard back, convinced the film wasn\u2019t accepted, and was on his \u201cfourth or fifth\u201d tequila to drown his sorrows when he got the call from their producer giving him the good news. Nguyen, who learned the news when he was on a train the next day, said he was \u201ccrying for 12 days in a row\u201d afterwards, while Balteaux explained that the festival\u2019s acceptance came as a victory for the filmmakers after years trying desperately to get the movie made. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt took seven years because basically, we went through all the ways to finance it, and every single channel said, \u2018Okay, that\u2019s very nice. It\u2019s very clever, but it\u2019s kind of too gay for us.\u2019 So we didn\u2019t make any money, nobody at all for so long,\u201d Balteaux said. \u201cThinking today we are in Cannes, after everything we\u2019ve been through, is just completely unreal, because we were pretty sure, even three years ago, maybe the movie will never go out. So, yeah, it\u2019s extremely tasteful.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cJim Queen\u201d premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, May 17. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like many animated movies, \u201cJim Queen\u201d begins with a musical number introducing the audience to the film\u2018s world.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[91293,3056,749,2482,91294,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-232714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-cannes","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-interviews","tag-jim-queen","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}