Gerard Weber was born in 1965 in Vienna, Austria. He studied film, history, and geography. In 1996, he co-founded projektor, a discussion forum on film, video and new media. Since 1998, he has been involved in sixpackfilm, an international distribution and sales agency of Austrian independently produced films and art videos. Besides his daily distribution and promotion work, he curates film programmes worldwide and occasionally gives lectures, talks, and writes about film aesthetics and the world of film distribution.
Gerald Weber
Gerald Weber 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 Gerald Weber’s submission:
to select 10 films out of uncountable masterpieces in nearly 150 years of short film history was hard to make. This is just a proposal.
— Gerald Weber| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| La Jetée | Chris Marker | France | 1962 | 28’ | ||
a classic and still one of my personal favorites, nearly entirely made of still photographs the film tells a dystopian story of an authoritarian regime. visuall sublime and stunning. |
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| Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine | Peter Tscherkassky | Austria | 2005 | 17’ | ||
a master piece from the Grand Seigneur of found footage film, Peter Tscherkassky. |
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| Burning Palace | Mara Mattuschka | Austria | 2009 | 32’ | ||
In subtle tableaux vivants sweaty bodies awake from a turbulent, dream-filled night at the hotel, loll male and female bodies out of grotesque poses into a scene of border transgression. Super erotic, super queer, super exiting ! |
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| Uyuni | Andrés Denegri | Argentina | 2005 | 8’ | ||
Digital and analogue images overlap in the photographs of the Bolivian city of Uyuni, creating breathtaking images. A clandestine narrative from off-screen conveys the latent violence of Latin America. |
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| Spacy | Takashi Ito | Japan | 1981 | 10’ | ||
A wild race through images, captured using stop motion technology, which seems to dissolve the coordinates of space, time and movement. One of many masterpieces by the great Japanese avant-garde filmmaker. |
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| The Girl Chewing Gum | John Smith | United Kingdom | 1976 | 12’ | ||
As an entertaining critique of conventional voice-over narration and the reflexion of cinematic codes and the power of illusions The Girl Chewing Gum has lost none of its incisive criticism to this day: the increasing helplessness of the voice, which is losing its authority, makes the film a passionate plea for freedom of vision – something that cinema must continually reclaim. |
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| Where Did Forever Go? | Michael Dwass | USA | 1997 | 29’ | ||
Using analogue S8-Material portaying his Grandmother suffering from demetia, Dwass transforms a deeply personal story into a poetic universal experience and gives the word 'forever' a new dimension. |
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| The Journey Eine Reise | Gerda E. Grossmann, Margit Eschenbach | Austria, Germany | 1992 | 12’ | ||
A road movie, a love story between two female terrorists, narrated in voice-over as the memories of one who was supposed to execute the other. Accompanied by the warm yellow light of streets, landscapes and courtyards. |
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| The Wrong Trousers | Nick Park | United Kingdom | 1993 | 30’ | ||
No need to comment. Even after countless viewings, it's still incredibly funny and breathtaking and a timeless classic in clay animation. |
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| Big Business | James W Horn, Leo McCarey | USA | 1929 | 19’ | ||
The funniest Laurel and Hardy film, full of anarchic humour and spectacle. |
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