Like many animated movies, “Jim Queen” begins with a musical number introducing the audience to the film‘s world. But the setting isn’t, 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 “Temple Gym,” 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’s both hyper-masc and hyper-queer.
A midnight screening at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, “Jim Queen” is a sharp, funny, and oh so homosexual tribute to the LGBT culture and nightlife of Paris, rendered in the film’s 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, “Jim Queen” is a project eight years in the making for the filmmaking team.
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.
“It was a very specific time, eight years ago,” Balteaux told IndieWire in an interview with Athane and Nguyen. “Marco and I were kind of living our best lives, being young and beautiful and going out all of the time, and we didn’t recognize ourselves in fiction, especially in animation, because it didn’t exist. The way the fiction shows the gay community, it was very cliché. We really wanted to put a light on all the diversity and the beautiful aspects of the queer community. That’s why we came up with this idea of taking away this queerness from us as a terrorist concept. And the idea was, ‘Okay, what would happen if tomorrow, everything in this beautiful world didn’t exist anymore?’”
Despite the clear love and knowledge the filmmakers have for the Paris gay scene, “Jim Queen” 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 — the filmmakers made an account to follow several gay influencers during production for research — who preaches self-love but looks down on anyone who doesn’t 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.
Balteaux and Nguyed themselves were self-described “gym queens” when they were younger, and according to Balteaux, the social circles they ran in were small and didn’t 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.
“We used to go to huge parties, like circuit parties,” Nguyen said. “They’re all the same, and everything is based on this toxic masculinity, the way you look. I think mocking that was pretty fun.”
In the film, Jim’s journey to moving past his own shallowness comes after a sudden and terrifying STD called “Heterosis,” 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 — amusingly depicted here as literal bears.
Heterosis acts a dual-sided metaphor. On one hand, it’s 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 — Jim is cast out from by the gym queen crowd when his positive test for the virus is exposed — 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 ’80s 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.
“When you look at the LGBT rights getting attacked, you know, the idea of a disease that destroys homosexuality, was just a fantasy,” Nguyen said. “But now it feels like the fantasy’s catching up a little bit with the reality right now. The surrounding context became political, made the movie political.”
The animation for “Jim Queen” comes primarily from the French adult animation studio Bobbypills, where Athane has worked since 2015, describing the place as a “school” for him. The crew had “no money” while the film was in production — they financed it partly via a Kickstarter campaign — which led to the “South Park” inspired look of the film, which the team describes as “snappy,” filled with strong, limited poses to convey the script’s anarchic sense of comedy.
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
“Marco really wanted, when you go to PowerBoyz the first time, he really wanted to have a real crowd,” Athane told IndieWire. “Me. I was like, ‘Why?’ Just do a painting and it won’t move. And Marco was like, ‘No, I want everybody to move, to dance, you have to have the feeling when you go to a party for the first time.’ So I think when you discover the PowerBoyz, you will have this feeling that you are in a Gym Queen party.”
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’s Den to a hedge maze in the Louvre garden that’s 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.
“The first time Simon and I went to Nicholas and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to talk about bears and puppies,’ And he thought all the things were invented,” Nguyen said. “So when you look at it from the exterior, you can say, ‘Okay, all this doesn’t exist. It’s fantasy communities in a gay world. But actually wasn’t. So the surroundings had to be on a true base, but amplified a little bit visually.”
Balteaux was at the Quetzel, one of the gay bars seen in “Jim Queen,” when he learned the movie had been accepted to Cannes. He went there with a friend after the team hadn’t heard back, convinced the film wasn’t accepted, and was on his “fourth or fifth” 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 “crying for 12 days in a row” afterwards, while Balteaux explained that the festival’s acceptance came as a victory for the filmmakers after years trying desperately to get the movie made.
“It took seven years because basically, we went through all the ways to finance it, and every single channel said, ‘Okay, that’s very nice. It’s very clever, but it’s kind of too gay for us.’ So we didn’t make any money, nobody at all for so long,” Balteaux said. “Thinking today we are in Cannes, after everything we’ve 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’s extremely tasteful.”
“Jim Queen” premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, May 17. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
