Christopher Small

Christopher Small is a writer and film programmer. He is also the editor of Outskirts Film Magazine.

Christopher Small 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 Christopher Small’s submission:

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
Grand Display of Brock’s Fireworks at the Crystal Palace Festa pirotecnica nel cielo di Londra	Charles Urban Trading Company	United Kingdom	1904	5’
Perfect movie.
Ten Inch Disappearing Carriage Gun Loading and Firing, Sandy Hook	W.K.L. Dickson / Edison Kinetograph	USA	1897	1’
The next century of cinema’s all there.
Makwayela	Jean Rouch	Mozambique, France, Canada	1977	20’
Dancing and revolution. A hypnotism.
Embracing Ni tsutsumarete	Naomi Kawase	Japan	1992	40’
In short / mid-length form, for a brief window of time in the 90s, Naomi Kawase was one of the movie world's geniuses.
An Ache in Every Stake	Del Lord	USA	1940	18’
Another perfect movie.
Alaya	Nathaniel Dorsky	Chile	1987	28’
Quite possible I prefer other Dorskys, but this has gotta be his most audacious experiment. A cinema of sand grains!
Fieldwork Footage	Zora Neale Hurston	USA	1928	4’
Greatest musical.
Picking Oranges Apanhar Laranjas	Sílvia das Fadas	Portugal	2012	1’
“I have told them I would pick oranges in California after having seen The Grapes of Wrath at Cinemateca.”
In the Lohm Valley Im Lohmgrund	Jürgen Böttcher	Germany	1977	27’
Manly men and drills. East Germany. Jürgen Böttcher, who has maybe the greatest, most unpleasant-to-pronounce director name of all time. Another perfect work of art.
July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon	Peter Hutton	USA	1971	33’
I'd be sad if Peter Hutton, a true genius if ever there was one, didn't make the list. Plus I like short films where the whole narrative is contained in the title.