Bonheur Suprême shot Homunculus, a documentary short, entirely inside Skyrim

The credits are the smoking gun. Homunculus ends by rolling NexusMods links—including Skyrim sex mods—the way another film would thank a camera house. Director Bonheur Suprême shot all 17 minutes inside The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the modding community is, functionally, the film's below-the-line crew.

The film follows a man drifting through a virtual world built on the codes of gay dating apps, looking for other men—and finding, instead, how the world sees him: as an "Arab," an ambiguous figure fetishized by white gay men and targeted by French police. The project started with a real Grindr message—a stranger enthusing about chatting with an "Arab"—and Bonheur Suprême built the film outward from that moment, using mods to strip Skyrim's hypermasculine warriors down into something vulnerable and observational. Bethesda's epic geography, emptied of quests, becomes a cruising ground and a mirror.

It worked. Homunculus premiered in the Opening Scenes section at Visions du Réel 2025, took the Prix Tënk, then ran Tallinn Black Nights, Festival dei Popoli, and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. It was streaming on Tênk through last week. The film came out of the first Nouvelle Bug residency in Rome in 2023—a program built on the premise that a whole film can be made with only a computer, which this one proves. We've watched modders repaint Skyrim before; this is the first time I've seen the practice turned into first-person documentary.