Nowness

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.

An original and danced adaptation of the Shakespeare classic.

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

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

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

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".

Last summer model-turned-director duo Kristell Chenut and Vincent Lacrocq traveled to the Canary Island haven Lanzarote to shoot Thirty-Six Hours with a team consisting of only themselves and their male-model protagonists, Clément Chabernaud and Jon Kortajarena. Arguably the two biggest names in the male model world—you’ll recognise Kortajarena as the young hustler from Tom Ford’s stylish feature A Single Man, and both from countless campaigns for the likes of H&M, Gucci and Prada—the narrative short sees the pair share a surreal day and night amid a crystalline island landscape.

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.

Offering a close observation of insects at a scale where they become unfamiliar, Italian director Gianluca Manzetti and electronic producer Feral turn a shared obsession with bugs into an abstract study of form and movement – set to a brooding deep techno soundtrack. Developed with an on-set entomologist, who advised on how to select, handle, and ethically approach the insects, Scenario Uno cast snails, earthworms, and stick insects, among others, as its protagonists, pulling viewers on a hypnotic, meditative journey that reveals an entirely different world when we witness these creatures with sensitivity and curiosity.

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.

In the mountains of Bolivia, a collective of Indigenous women challenge gender stereotypes through skateboarding — tearing down the notoriously steep streets wearing traditional pollera skirts. For them, skateboarding is more than a sport — it’s a statement of resilience and empowerment in a machismo society. As the collective gains visibility, they are working toward their biggest goal yet: building Bolivia's first skate park and community center designed for girls.

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.

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.

After failing to find her place in the city, Jialing returns to her borderland hometown and takes up work again in a rundown nightclub. As she tries to rebuild her life, her estranged father reappears, hoping to reconnect before the holidays.

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

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.

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.

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.