Nowness

A portrait of Victoria Sin, and the transformative power of drag.

An original and danced adaptation of the Shakespeare classic.

It's about a memory of a place and a time. It’s about an idea of isolation and the sea’s omnipresence. An exploration between temporary and permanent that takes us to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on a trip around the Azores and a specific project located in São Miguel island: Two Manifolds by Nuno Pimenta.

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

“Take life lightly, for lightness is not superficial, but gliding above things, not having weights on your heart.” This is the quote from Postmodernist writer Italo Calvino that inspired director Luca Werner to explore the carefree days of youth in this film. Lupine opens with a young man adoring a Lupine plant, a vibrant wildflower that grows throughout the Mediterranean and marks the beginning of Spring and new life. “I think there are certain moments in our youth where we feel completely light and careless, like we are in a flow,” says Werner, who followed a group of three real-life friends on a coastal sojourn across Rhodes. “I don’t believe that these moments end when we grow up. I believe we get a glimpse of them from time to time.”

After recently going blind, a young gay man struggles to navigate his new life in the shadows.

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.

Over a monsoon-soaked day in a crumbling Mumbai building, a young masseuse moves quietly from body to body. Her caring touch soothes the pain of an ailing, bedridden woman, and the anxiety of a new mother, exhausted by duty and desire. As care slips toward intimacy, her hands become a conduit through which life, death, and desire pass without resolution.

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.

In this five-minute film, professional bull rider Ezekiel “Blue” Mitchell introduces the audience to his world of bucking bulls and reminisces over how he came to be a cowboy. Mostly self-taught, his passion and skill took him to the elite levels of the sport where he now competes against people who he thought of as heroes when he was riding a self-built bucking bull.

Two young people discover each other as they explore a labyrinthine derelict Glasgow swimming pool. A high-energy contemporary dance piece shot in the emptied Govanhill Baths in Glasgow.

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".

Mala Hierba is a documentary about a country, a people and a miracle crop, hemp, which lies at the heart of the sustainability movement in fashion. London-based director Adriana Roslin takes us on a jounrey revealing how hemp is harvested by local women living in Nepal's mountain villages to when it's spun, processed, dyed and sold as clothing in Kathmandu or around the world.

Cinema's reigning romantic Luca Guadagnino premiers a modern-day paean to the good times, inspired by a Wolfgang Tillmans picture.

At the edge of Shirahama, a coastal tourist town in Japan, an ageing scientist works to unlock the biological secret of immortality held in the life cycle of a tiny jellyfish. At a temple in Kyoto, a Zen priest contemplates the metaphysical immortality held within a single breath. Some years ago, filmmaker Spencer Macdonald read an article in The New York Times titled "Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?" by Nathaniel Rich. Comprehensive and insightful, the article is compelling not least for its potential to deliver a revelation that defies one of life’s most fundamental truths; that we all live then die. It also shines a light on the arrogance of the anthropocene, the evolving landscape of Shirahama, and a detailed insight into the life and work of the charming and fervently curious Dr. Shin Kubota, a warm and eccentric scientist determined to harness the biological secrets of a jellyfish for humanity.

“When I was growing up, my mum very rarely spoke about her life in the Philippines,” says director James J. Robinson of the inspiration behind this film. “My only impression of her life before moving to Australia was formed exclusively through rare family photos and the music she’d sing out loud in her room.” Inang Maynila was inspired by the director’s desire to paint a picture of his mother’s childhood in Quezon City and, by extension, for an idea of his heritage. Robinson spoke to his mother’s school friends, visited her former school and church, and stayed in her local neighborhood. “Speaking to these lifelong friends of my hers, I discovered that the story of my mother’s childhood ran much deeper than that of one person,” says the director, who used local actors to recreate the narrated memories of these women.

NOWNESS China has released a new series of films focusing on traditional Chinese culture as defined by a new generation of young people. Young Masters: Baji Quan is the first episode and focuses on a 23-year-old man from Hebei province who is a stalwart practitioner of Baji Quan—a traditional Chinese fighting style known for its graceful stillness and sudden moments of targeted and ferocious violence. Director Haonan Shen traveled to the Mengcun Baji Quan International Training Center to profile Wu Hao whose paternal ancestor Wu Zhong (1712–1802) was the first recorded Baji Quan teacher. In this evocative portrait of a young man’s passion for sharing his family’s rich heritage, we get up close and personal with the violent elbow strikes, staff jabs, fierce rising and firm falling stances that characterize the martial art.

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.