Nowness

In the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into males and females. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” - men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned limbo between the two genders.

Two Asian-American teenagers meet in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant while having dinner with their families.

Lou, a teenage tomboy in a small Californian town, idolizes her single father. When he has a date over one night and she is cast out of the house, Lou wanders to the outer reaches of town and into a new era of teenage identity.

Marking the 30th anniversary of Derek Jarman's passing, close friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton leads a poetic tribute to the late artist and filmmaker with a slow, meditative journey into Jarman’s poem "Chroma" during a visit to Beijing.

Sohaila, Zahra and Zeinab train every day. Their dream is to become professional fighters and to show the world that all people are equal. Director Lukas Tielke and his team spent a week in Malakasa refugee camp, outside Athens, getting to know these inspirational young Afghan women.

Artist and filmmaker Quentin Jones joins forces with Miley Cyrus in a kinky collaboration, stripping away the pop phenomenon's cartoonish persona in "Miley Cyrus: Tongue Tied".

Drifting from her reality on the streets of Mexico City, a woman's chaotic thoughts spill into verse in short film Weird - directed by Flavio Morales and Nicolas Corvino. Overwhelmed by the routines and structures that direct her day-to-day, she questions the nature of love, life, death and existence itself, undergoing a metamorphosis as an uncanny feeling takes hold. Playing with visual effects makeup to evoke the image of a fish, Morales and Corvino enlisted makeup artist Feña Acuña to center their protagonist's dissociation, exploring the depths of her mind as she becomes immersed in thought.

“It was while I was interrogating myself on the meaning of photography as art, especially in terms of photojournalism, that I met Colin Jones,” says Frankie Carradona, a London-based artist and visual storyteller. “Things often happen for a reason.” Born in London in 1936, Colin Jones had an unorthodox trajectory into photography. Coming from a working-class home in the East End and also training with the English National Ballet, Jones went on to become a documentary photographer for The Observer, alongside Magnum greats like Don McCullen and Ian Berry. During his career he also shot iconic portraits of British rock band The Who and musicians Mick Jagger and Pete Townsend.

A frazzled adulteress played by Parisian beauty Zoë Le Ber wakes up in the familiar surroundings of Bar Chateau Marmont, only to find herself trapped in a prank at the hands of her restaurant-owner lover, Fred.

In the first of a new series of Define Beauty, Berlin-based directer Matt Lambert—known for his often-NSFW work exploring sex and intimacy—gets under the skin of our infatuation with sweat. Read more on NOWNESS

Arab-American filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi embraces the rhythmic rituals that have run alongside Islamic tradition throughout the centuries in this surreal and poetic short film. Piecing together old and new, Al-Rashi's dream-like imagery breathes fresh air to a subject hardly seen in positive light.

Two girls find themselves locked in an Oslo public swimming hall and bond over school gossip, boys and dancing to the psychedelic sounds of Lindstrøm.

Varanasi is the Indian city where Hindus go to die. Stretching along the Ganges, Varanasi holds great spiritual significance because Hindu scriptutres say that anyone who dies there will attain moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Berlin-based director Dan Braga Ulvestad captures life and death in India’s heartland in this moving documentary filled with exquisite cinematic moments. By the River starts its narrative journey with the city’s “death hotels,” dedicated apartments where people wait to die, sometimes for decades, so they can be cremated on the banks of the Ganges.

There are houses, and then there’s Ricardo Bofill’s house: a brutalist former cement factory of epic proportions on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. A grandiose monument to industrial architecture in the Catalonian town of Sant Just Desvern, La Fabrica is a poetic and personal space that redefines the notion of the conventional home. “Nowadays we want everyone who comes through our door to feel comfortable, but that's not Bofill’s idea here,” says filmmaker Albert Moya, who directed latest installment of In Residence. “It goes much further, you connect with the space in a more spiritual way.” Rising above lush gardens that mask the grounds’ unglamorous roots, the eight remaining silos that once hosted an endless stream of workmen and heavy machinery now house both Bofill’s private life, and his award-winning architecture and urban design practice.

What does it mean to be goth—to be an outsider, to live both on the margins and in the midst of society? Filmmakers Jordan Hemingway and Alban Adam prize open the coffin on a world of darkness and light, exploring its multiplicities and intersections with subcultures and the ever-present experience of queerness.

Giuseppe Orlandi is an alpine rescuer who has lived and worked in the shadow of The Grigna, a massif in the province of Lecco, for over fifty years. As a member of the XIX Lariana Delegation of The CNSAS Lombardia mountain rescue group, he has saved hundreds of lives. Filmmaker Achille Mauri traveled across the beautiful yet treacherous mountain face to profile Orlandi—known to many as “Il Calümer”—in the terrain that the Italian knows best. The heroic deeds that Orlandi has carried out over the years have, for the most part, only been acknowledged by the people he has saved. With the release of this documentary profile, Mauri wants to shine a spotlight on the courageous work of Orlandi and other voluntary mountain rescuers like him.

“Sex work. The phrase evokes so much emotion, yet we understand it so poorly,” rising director Yago Hunt-Laudi wrote on an Instagram post celebrating the premiere of his new film, The Chrysalis. In this documentary profile, he paints an intimate portrait of stripper Haley Rolland, a young woman from Missouri who speaks about taking control of her body and the difficulties she encountered during the pandemic.

A moving recording of the late writer and renowned jazz singer Abbey Lincoln is captured in this new film from Brooklyn-born director Rodney Passé, who has previously worked with powerhouse music video director Khalil Joseph. Reading from her own works, Lincoln’s voice sets the tone for a film that explores the African American experience through fathers and their sons.

Thirteen-year-old skateboarder Yumeka Oda was set to represent her country on home soil at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but with this year’s games postponed until next July her dreams of winning gold have also been put on hold.