NOWNESS presents three curated film programs inspired by this year’s theme, featuring short films and moving image works. The full program will also be available online at NOWNESS.com.

Artist’s Cinema / Artists’ Cinema comes to Asia NOW for a special evening of screenings and conversation led by curator Dr. Shwetal Ashvin Patel.
For one night only, Patel will introduce and present a handpicked selection of bold, poetic works, offering Paris audiences an intimate glimpse into the evolving language of South Asian moving-image practices. The programme reimagines cinema as a space for artistic risk-taking and shared experience, celebrating its ability to move fluidly between gallery and screen, history and experiment.

“This evening programme at Asia Now looks to nurture the poetic potential of cinema—envisioning film as a space of refuge and resistance in a time of acceleration, exploitation, and erasure,” says curator Dr. Shwetal Ashvin Patel. “These films transcend borders, styles, and formats, opening a space that welcomes diverse ideas, perspectives, and ways of remembering.”

The films in this program are deeply influenced by the individual and collective journeys of Iranian artists grappling with the concept and memory of home. These filmmakers, hailing from Iran and the broader diaspora across France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and Spain, have all experienced some form of displacement. Their cinematic works bear the imprint of this experience, reshaping their understanding of home—be it a place of dwelling, an in-between space, an inner feeling of belonging, or a restless state of being.

For these artists, the traditional duality of “here or there” dissolves into a more complex question: “If not here, then where?” This perpetual query forges a definition of home that defies a single, static meaning. What, then, is home? Is it a place caught between the echoes of past memories and the pull of future aspirations? Is it an intangible sanctuary of the mind, a construct beyond words, or a tangible location with discernible coordinates and a name? The films in this program invite us to explore these profound questions alongside the artists, offering a multifaceted meditation on what it truly means to be at home.

In the face of oppressive structures, laughter can be a radical act. These films handpicked by curator Eunice Tsang, exploring how artists utilise humor as a double-edged blade. Commenting on issues ranging from police brutality, censorship, to gender politics, these films navigate complex terrains through the absurd and satirical, using laughter not to comfort, but to provoke a deeper, more disquieting form of cultural reflection.

Complementing Lahore Biennale Foundation’s presentation of artworks in the Monnaie de Paris, Asia NOW also presents a video program from Of Mountains and Seas, the 2024 edition, featuring video commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation from Bani Abidi, Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick), Niamat Nigar, Fazal Rizvi, and Zheng Bo, as well as works by Gidree Bawlee, Sin Wai Kin,  Salma Jamal Mousham and Kamruzzaman Shadhin.  The program, like the works on view throughout the Monnaie de Paris, offer a vision of ecological awareness from Asian perspectives. Powered by the French Embassy to Pakistan.

Safe House presents works by seven contemporary filmmakers who examine kinship and memory, particularly through the lens of queerness and gender. Spanning China and its diaspora communities, this programme traces experimental documentary practices from 2007 to the present, exploring kinship as one of the most formative—and sometimes fraught—forces shaping identity. These works map stories rooted in tensions, fragile economies of care, and inherited trauma, undertaking both personal and collective reckonings of this era. The cinematic space transforms into a safe house: not merely a refuge, but a place where suppressed narratives are negotiated, reassembled, and discussed.