Content from Nowness

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Uprooted from the Ivory Coast and sent to live in Denmark as a child, professional boxing champion Landry “Hardkore” Kore tells the story of his eighteen-year journey from homelessness and family breakdown to international success in an elevated documentary. When Danish Director Meeto met the boxer a few years ago he knew that the conventional shaky cam athletic profile would do no justice to Kore’s philosophy, intelligence and—as the director describes—his “big heart”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this film, Pastor George of First African Baptist Church lends us his wisdom and experience of leading a congregation through the most turbulent year in living history. “I admired everything about that man, from his shoes to how he kissed my grandmother's hand,” says Lucas. “When Covid first hit, the cloud of isolation, ironically, drove me to reconnect with a place where Black folks have always found solace and care; our churches.”

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

Dancers move through everyday city spaces: shopfronts, intersections and construction zones, treating Shanghai's streets as an impromptu set.