Catarina Mourao

Catarina Mourão studied Music and Film in Bristol and Edinburgh. In 1998, she founded AporDOC, the Portuguese Documentary Association, which oversees the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Since 1998, she has been teaching Film and Documentary in many BA and MA courses. In 2000, she founded Laranja Azul, an independent production company specialising in creative documentaries and visual arts. In 2016, she obtained her PhD in Film from the University of Edinburgh. Her main areas of research are creative documentary, realism, memory, dreams, and archives.

Catarina Mourao participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Catarina Mourao’s submission:

Movie Original Title Director Country Year Duration
Ulysse Agnès Varda France 1983 22’
The Girl Chewing Gum John Smith United Kingdom 1976 12’
Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia Hollis Frampton USA 1971 36’
La Paresse Portrait of a Lazy Woman Chantal Akerman Belgium 1986 14’
One Week Buster Keaton , Edward F. Cline USA 1920 24’
Our Room La nostra habitació Jaume Claret Muxart Spain 2025 28’
Nest Hreiður Hlynur Pálmason Denmark, Iceland 2022 22’
Ice Merchants João Gonzalez Portugal 2022 14’
The Bakery Girl of Monceau La Boulangère de Monceau Eric Rohmer France 1962 24’
Evening Lessons Cours du soir Jacques Tati France 1967 30’