L’arrière pays

The fact that Hinterland was directed by Jacques Nolot is purely coincidental: the director originally considered was not available. Nolot turned the film to his own hand and rewrote it with plenty of imagination to match 20 years of his life in the village where he was born. Authentic starting points were not only the basis for this sensual remembrance of the distant past, but also the beginning of the autobiographically inspired trilogy that was to emerge from Hinterland with Glowing Eyes and Before I Forget as respectively second and third parts. Each part tells the story of the life of a homosexual man who gets a different personality in each film, but is always played by Nolot himself.
While he is a trained actor himself, Nolot likes to work with non-professional actors. In the first part, they portray the characters who were behind a rite of passage in his childhood. Sometimes they were acquaintances or friends of his father.
In the last part, Nolot has his actors making their first appearance portray a specific aspect of his personality, as a result of which the protagonist plays opposite men he was or could have been – and maybe one day could be. Nolot films like a painter, with a steady hand. Tranquil moments provide a calm basis for his characteristic sexual openness.

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