The premise of the documentary Portrait of Nowness is deceptively simple: a series of individuals across continents, Austria, Senegal, the United States, Japan and the Ukrainian front, are equipped with body cameras and asked, implicitly, to continue their daily lives. What emerges is a continuous, first-person flow of images, a fragmentary kaleidoscope capturing gestures, routines and ruptures.
The radical first-person documentary is a joint effort by Juri Rechinsky and Mario Hainzl. Rechinsky brings the rawness of his earlier documentaries into his fiction works, which also embrace this aesthetic. Hainzl, working across visual art and film, has shown a sustained interest in mediated perception and the instability of the image, frequently interrogating how technological apparatuses shape both representation and reception. Portrait of Nowness synthesises these concerns into a shared formal experiment, where authorship is partially displaced onto the filmed subjects themselves.
The use of body cameras is not merely a stylistic device but a structural commitment. By delegating the act of filming to the protagonists, the directors relinquish conventional control over framing and composition. In the age of ubiquitous screens and cameras, recording daily life is no longer that radical.
Hainzl and Rechinsky, however, line up a cast of subjects not only from different continents but also from different walks of life. The curatorship becomes crucial, and Rechinsky and Hainzl revealed there were many more subjects and hundreds of hours of raw footage, from which they selected those that would sustain attention.
Portrait of Nowness is seemingly structured across a single day, from dusk until dawn; however, the footage has been procured over several years, which becomes clear in the contrast between Ukraine before and after the Russian full-scale invasion, as the filmmakers juxtapose calm days in Kyiv streets without air raid sirens against the realities of trench warfare, with bombs falling and soldiers being killed.
Ukraine is not the only stark distinction, though. On one hand, there is a pregnant woman riding around with her child until she goes into labour in a home birth, the experience captured entirely in first person. On the other, there is a young Buddhist novice in the Himalayas within a truly picaresque scenery, an African schoolgirl spending time with her friends, and in one especially touching vignette, a legless homeless man in India who uses the money he begs to buy food for stray dogs.
Portrait of Nowness is a collective depiction of domestic routines, each markedly different given the subjects’ varied backgrounds and cultures. There are some universal similarities, but the differences in human experience remain stark.
Each protagonist operates within a differently adjusted state of normalcy. The experience remains raw. There is no choreographed or staged drama, yet the juxtaposition of routines underlines that being human is defined by persistence and survival.
Hainzl and Rechinsky’s work is not a conventional journalistic documentary but is closer to a video installation edited into a coherent episodic structure. The collective social experiment of the film reveals different shades of normalcy across various contexts. The Indian vignette is particularly affecting, shot entirely from ground level as the man moves through the streets, sweeping, asking for donations, and beginning and ending his day with song.
He also takes care of stray dogs and, despite his disadvantaged position, stands up for a weaker person in a street conflict. While the Himalayan episode might appear more serene, the fact that the novice is a young boy means his day, alongside mandatory duties, is filled with boyish frolicking, which gives the episode a certain innocence, whereas the Indian part, which could lean toward existential gloom, is instead marked by the protagonist’s persistence despite his circumstances.
Portrait of Nowness ultimately functions less as a narrative-driven documentary and more as a study in contrasts, where different versions of normal life unfold across continents and circumstances. What emerges is not a unified perspective but a juxtaposition of unfiltered realities, in which normalcy is shaped by context, environment and condition.
By placing these experiences side by side without hierarchy, the film underlines how what constitutes “everyday life” shifts depending on where one stands, whether in domestic routine, spiritual discipline or frontline survival.
The film screened at the 2026 Diagonale in Graz, Austria.