Emerson Goo

Emerson Goo is a Deaf writer, film curator, and planner/landscape designer from and based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

Emerson Goo 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 Emerson Goo’s submission:

I didn't really assemble this with canonicity or "greatness" as my guiding metric. This is just one cross-section of my interests and tastes.

— Emerson Goo

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
The Sand Island Story	Victoria Keith	USA	1981	28’
In Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, shorts have been a primary format for filmmakers for financial and logistical reasons. The 28-minute length of The Sand Island Story reflects broadcast mandates, and it was precisely through infrastructures of broadcast journalism and public television that early independent documentaries like this one were bankrolled and distributed. Keith's film is a fiercely political look at dispossession and survival. Its legacy speaks for itself.
For My Crushed Right Eye つぶれかかった右眼のために	Toshio Matsumoto	Japan	1968	12’
So many things I love about this period of avant-garde Japanese filmmaking are not just present in this film but also pushed to their limits. Potent, explosive, chaotic material. Hijacking the media and reality.
Mobile Men	Apichatpong Weerasethakul	Thailand	2008	4’
A celebration of life.
Cry Me a River 河上的爱情	Jia Zhangke	China, France, Spain	2008	19’
How does one tell a tale both classical and modern, that follows the contours and waterways of a changing landscape, in which lives, relationships, memories are always fading and being born? Centuries drift by in this film.
Tobacco Embers तंबाकुंच्या चाकीला ऊब आली	Yugantar	India	1982	27’
Cinema that commits itself to and moves among and with the downtrodden of society. Thanks to Devika Girish for introducing this work to me and many others.
Twin Peaks	Al Wong	USA	1977	50’
Like circling the edge of the world.
idizwadidiz	Isiah Medina	Canada	2017	8’
Shorts can focus our attention on the smallest details, units, and mechanics of cinema, which Medina uses to their fullest potential here, advancing new ways of understanding the frame and the cut.
About Narration Erzählen	Harun Farocki , Ingemo Engström	Germany	1957	58’
It might be pushing the definition of short at 58 minutes, but I chose this over more well-known Farocki titles like Inextinguishable Fire because Engström's contributions to this film make it truly special, and because it gets at ideas that are so fundamental to Farocki's practice in general.
My House Walk-Through 私の家のウォークスルー	PiroPito	Japan	2016	12’
We must acknowledge that some of the best shorts of our time are being posted on social media sites like YouTube and running laps around the stuff you see at film festivals. This is one of them.
Vaimoe	Edith Amituanai	Samoa	2024	16’
When I think of this film, I feel happy and hopeful for the future of filmmaking in the Pacific, and I think that's as good a reason as any to include it in this list.