[Article to be found in the summer issue, in kiosks or by subscription.] At the start of the journey, the creators of Jim Queen, in cinemas this Wednesday, June 17, did not imagine ending up on the steps of the Cannes Film Festival. Marco Nguyen and Simon Balteaux, respectively director and screenwriter of the animated film, recount their odyssey.
Photographie : Audoin Desforges pour têtu·
“Too segmented.” This term in marketing language, which sounds like a cleaver for many projects off the beaten path, the Jim Queen team will have heard more often than not during the development of this oddity in French cinema. It must be said that they did not spare the screenplay of the animated feature, whose starting point essentially resembles a gay joke: “Jim, sexy icon of the Paris gay scene, sees his life tilt when he contracts heterose, a strange virus that transforms gay men… into heterosexuals!”
The project, not something you make up, crystallized around a meeting at VendrediX. And for good reason, Marco Nguyen, the director of Jim Queen, is one of the coorganizers of this famous Parisian evening. From his childhood, the forty-something has kept another passion than the night, nourished by Disney: “I used to watch The Little Mermaid and Hercules on loop. Moreover, I think I was a little in love with the character.” Like many from the Club Dorothée generation, he grows up with Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and the other Japanese animes, which will later fuel the hyper-saturated visual energy of Jim Queen. At 17, the boy leaves Aix-en-Provence for Paris, heading to the Gobelins School of Image Arts. He will then work as animation director on The Rabbi’s Cat (Le Chat du Rabbin) (2011), then as first assistant director on The Swallows of Kabul (Les Hirondelles de Kaboul) (2019).
Bobbypills, le studio des Kassos
That evening, then, at his VendrediX, Marco Nguyen runs into Simon Balteaux. Of the same age, this Ardennais by origin started far from cinema, as a landscape architect, before changing careers: “I always wanted to write and to act. So, with my first salary, I paid for the Florent course.” Having become a screenwriter, he worked on TV movies and scripted reality programs in the style of Le Jour où tout a basculé. “One of my great prides, he smiles, was managing to include a lesbian kiss in a program of this type, at 14h. I realized that I wanted and needed to tell queer stories.”
That’s lucky, Marco Nguyen has the perfect project under his arm… He shows him “Slt t cho”, a clip he tinkered with two years earlier to promote his parties, and which already plays with gay clichés, especially the one of the gym queen obsessed with the shape of his muscles. Uploaded on YouTube, the short film caught the eye of a certain David Alric, founder of Bobbypills, the French animation studio created in 2017. Specializing in content for young adults, he is responsible for Vermin or Les Kassos. Sensing potential, the boss asks him to think about a series. And it is to co-write the script for this project that Marco taps Simon on the shoulder. “It’s fun, because when you’re a screenwriter, you often meet someone who comes to you to talk about a great project, notes Simon. But there, I immediately saw that it was real and that he had grasped something about the gay universe that I found wonderful.” Their shared humor draws as much from La Cité de la peur as from South Park or Kuzco, with the idea of a film “at 3,000 per hour, with a gag per shot”, summarizes Marco Nguyen.
Some time later, the duo arrives at Bobbypills with an initial draft of the screenplay: the gay community is unsettled by a virus that makes people heterosexual. “At the time, we were working with Canal+ on The Kassos among others, recalls David Alric. I had therefore presented the Jim Queen project to their editorial director, who loved it, but she told me it wouldn’t pass the commissions because of its subject. And she was right.” False start. The Bobbypills teams then opt for a fallback solution: forgotten, the series, Jim Queen will be a feature film, the studio’s first, up to now specialized in short formats.
Projet barré cherche un million
A funding search then begins to solidify the budget of the project that has just grown in dimension. In the French cinema system, films are generally financed half by public subsidies, and half by private support, often provided by distributors, television channels, or streaming platforms. Surprisingly, the first part is quickly secured: the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée grants the project an advance on receipts. “Few films obtain it, especially in animation, and even fewer those aimed at an adult audience”, notes David Alric.
Alas, the part is far from won. To launch production smoothly, one million euros are still missing. “Finding a broadcaster to fund the private part was the cross and the banner,” summarizes David Alric. “Everyone said the project was clever, funny, impactful… But when it came to committing, there was no one left!” It isn’t so much the trashy humor of the script that unsettles, but its universe of A to Z gay: homosexuals moving among themselves, with their codes, their jokes and their kisses, necessarily, it’s “segmenting”. “In their eyes it wouldn’t interest many people, explains Simon Balteaux. Some even went so far as to tell us they had a gay friend and that he wasn’t at all like those in our script.”
Years pass, and private backing is slow to come. David Alric ultimately decides to go all in: “We offset this big gap in the game by putting all the studio’s savings at stake. It’s a very rare scenario. This decision obviously weakened the company, but the film seemed too important. It had to see the light of day.” In June 2025, to solidify an still-fragile budget, the studio launches a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, kicked off by an evening at the Rosa Bonheur des Buttes-Chaumont, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. “Unfortunately, we faced a failure, recalls the director and producer Morgann Gicquel, then sought for her crowdfunding expertise. It was difficult to sell the project without really having images to show.”
Ça part à Cannes !
The second time will be the good one. A second campaign is launched in the autumn on Ulule, which reaches nearly €120,000 in January 2026. A drop in the film’s budget, but the step was decisive, argues Morgann Gicquel: “You don’t run a crowdfunding campaign for money, but to find people, support. For example, La Briochée, who dubs several secondary characters, would not have been in the film without this campaign.”
Thanks to regional public aid, the studios Waooh and Gao Shan, respectively Belgian and Réunion-based, join the adventure and production can begin. Everything then moves very quickly. Jérémy Gillet, who had been auditioned in 2023 for the role of Lucien, one of the film’s protagonists, is summoned to record the lines for his character. Blindly, since the animation of the images will be laid out in a second pass based on the actors’ voices. “I based myself on stick-figure figurines, black and white, that moved”, says the 25-year-old Belgian actor, whom têtu· had spotted in 2023 in the film Arrête avec tes mensonges.
In the wake of this final stretch, as a first crown to its efforts, the team learns that Jim Queen is selected for the Cannes Film Festival, to be shown in the Midnight Screenings. There, David Alric could start to relax: “I doubted a lot when we could not bring the broadcasters on board, but there I told myself that we had really done well to take all these risks.” The Cannes stop would reassure everyone. After the joyful ascent of the gang up the stairs, the film’s premiere, which têtu· attended, was a great moment of queer collective joy.
