“Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025

All My Life is a 3-minute pan movement that opens on an old picket fence framed by the blue sky above and a stretch of summer-brown grass below. On the soundtrack, you can hear the crackle and hiss of an old record. Soon, Ella Fitzgerald starts singing “All My Life” in a 1936 session with the pianist Teddy Wilson.

Letters from a Palestinian woman living in war-torn Lebanon to her daughter, whom she has not seen for years, and a series of photographs convey the effects of war and exile on their personal and cultural life, with a nuanced look at family relationships.

Begone Dull Care brings a wild piece of music to life with abstract expressionist animation. Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip, impossible to simulate with digital tools.

In what is widely considered his greatest film, Len Lye reduces cinema to its most basic elements by scratching onto black and white film, using a variety of means ranging from dental tools to an ancient Native American arrowhead. The title references modern physics: ‘free radicals’ are particles of energy.

Each Saturday, historian and activist Alicia Vega transforms the chapel of Lo Hermida into a screening room for about a hundred children. They have never seen an actual movie, and in her workshop, they learn more about cinema. Through watching films, the children discover a larger reality and a different world.

A cat is half-sleeping, half-listening to Federico Mompou’s “Pájaro triste”. This first tape in Chris Marker’s Bestiaire trilogy, a series of short films devoted exclusively to animals, features his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte.

A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between artist Carolee Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, observed by their cat, Kitch.

While in San Francisco to promote her latest film, Agnès Varda gets a tip from an acquaintance. In Sausalito, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area, there lives a Greek painter named Jean Varda. Could they be related?

In Ever is Over All, Pipilotti Rist juxtaposes the field and its flowers with her magically powerful wand, and transposes acts of aggression and annihilation into benevolent and creative ones. An anarchic young woman gleefully breaks windows.

After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction on the silver screen of men and women touching. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror ecstatic tension—but often the game of glances is enough to set a scene ablaze. Nazarbazi collages these intense cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire in Iranian film, which also echoes our own pandemic time of physical distancing.

Between 2020 and 2021, the Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason filmed his three children building a tree house in their backyard. Using a fixed frame, his lockdown project yielded a fascinating study of the seasons grounded in the leisurely rhythms of kids at play.

A woman lies awake at night. Nearby, a set of theatre backdrops unspools itself, unveiling two alternate landscapes. Upon the woman’s blue sheet, a flicker of light reflects and illuminates her realm of insomnia.

A rich boy is playing alone with his enormous collection of expensive toys. When he looks out the window, he sees a poor boy on the street, also playing alone. They duel, each showing off their toys in a bid to outdo the other. Satyajit Ray called Two a ‘film fable’.

A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs marching and picketing with the word ‘solidarity’ superimposed on the screen. Like Wieland’s earlier films, Solidarity uniquely combines political awareness with an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour.

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first major film introduced their grippingly sparse, elliptical style to international audiences. Not Reconciled brought an intense sense of the present to this narrative of three architects reckoning with their family’s traumatic wartime history.

In this short animated film by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, various zoo animals are interviewed about their living conditions. The film points to issues regarding the living conditions of wild animals, but succeeds in doing so with a lot of humour.

Filmed over a single unbroken take, this work brings together slice-of-life vignettes. On a busy street corner, three young men have a conversation over food. Suddenly, a motorcycle crash occurs nearby. As the crowd clears, a young boy performs street tricks and a beer girl plies her trade.

A man is sitting on a picnic blanket in a Chicago park on Lake Michigan. He is filmed from above. Every 10 seconds, the camera zooms out by a factor of 10. Finally, we see the entire universe, with constellations floating around like clouds of cream in ink-black coffee.

The War Game presents a fictional scenario concerning the consequences of an explosion in Kent following the escalation of an East-West conflict. The BBC withdrew its support, stating that “the effect of the film is considered too horrific for television broadcast”. The film had a significant impact on the growing campaign for nuclear disarmament.

A pristine white bathroom soon becomes a site of crimson-stained shaving carnage in Martin Scorsese’s daring student film, a potent and disturbing allegory for the horrors of the Vietnam War. What starts out as a pleasant morning soon goes horribly wrong, turning into a bloody spectacle of self-mutilation.

Zuza Banasińska reinvents the famous Slavic witch Baba Yaga through a clever montage of films from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive, containing sexist content. Questioning their own non-binary identity, they unleash the queer dimension of found footage tasked with conveying a normative conception of identity.

Today, the flicker film Arnulf Rainer is still a landmark in the history of cinema. In this radical work, Peter Kubelka reduced cinema to its simplest form of expression: each frame is composed of light or darkness, silence or sound.

Manuel Muñoz Rivas turns the daily passage of a ferry on a Spanish river into a ritual crossing of sacred beauty, as the passengers’ souls wander through suspended narrations of everyday life.

In 1976, the announcement of the imminent eruption of La Soufrière, Guadeloupe’s main volcano, left Basse-Terre completely depopulated. Werner Herzog travels there with his team and two cameramen as the danger reaches its peak.

Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman was arguably the first surrealist film ever made. The film tells the story of a clergyman who falls madly in love with a beautiful woman, but must defeat an equally eager rival.

During the Cold War, the Thai village of Nabua was accused of harbouring communists. Its inhabitants were subject to violent reprisals. Phantoms of Nabua evokes these atrocities, but does so under a luminous guise.

During her vacation in Cuba in 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Agnès Varda made a photo report about Cuban society and culture after the revolution. This delightful black-and-white composition makes the edit resemble a choreography and intermingles the photos with catchy Cuban rhythms.

Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy.

In 2014, artist and forensic audio analyst Lawrence Abu Hamdan examined audio files of the shots that killed Nadeem Nawara and Mohamed Abu Daher in the West Bank of Palestine. Rubber Coated Steel does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence.

In Suzan Pitt’s cult classic Asparagus, the indomitable growth of an asparagus plant is associated with female sexuality. As the urbane world turns absurdist, the green fruit transforms this reality.

Two young men in a pickup truck, from different parts of the world, discover each other through the use of a camera. As the camera lenses change, a landscape of rice fields and a cinema crew get into the frame. The camera then reshoots the road and the men, as if we were witnessing a film rehearsal.

A ten-metre-high diving board. People climb up: to leap or to climb down? Ten Meter Tower is an entertaining study of human vulnerability.

In this documentary essay, Harun Farocki shows that the famous Lumière brothers’ sequence of the same title already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labour.

A day in the life of a camel, endlessly walking in circles in a sesame mill: a gloomy, small space. But this remarkable film also has humour. Those who wish to can see a parallel between the emotional life of the dromedary and that of censored filmmakers in Sudan. Both dream of freedom.

In a shopping mall, two women sing about their favourite items but are quickly pursued by a masked cannibal who is intent on forcing his way to their love. Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism and dread in America.

Filmmaker António Reis (with the help of Margarida Cordeiro, his wife) portrays the life of Jaime Fernandes, a peasant diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. They focus on the artistic legacy he left behind.

Everything in Anticipation of the Night is shown in a multitude of aspects, at varying speeds, with crucial changes in lighting and graininess. This film bids farewell to the protagonist’s last dying thought and to all the primitive “point of view” tricks of narrative cinema.

Joris Ivens films Amsterdam during a rain shower. This poetic city symphony, a “cine-poem” per the film’s opening title cards, shifts moods, following the gradual transformation from sunny Amsterdam streets to raindrops in the canals and on windows, umbrellas, and trams, until it clears and the sun breaks through once again.

With a 16mm Bolex camera, French-Peruvian filmmaker Rose Lowder developed her own unique way of filming. In her cinema of perception, she interweaves time and space. Her famous “Bouquets” consist of a series of one-minute compositions whose 1440 frames are interlaced so that each bouquet of flowers also becomes a bouquet of images.

This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.

This short animated film seems playful only at first glance—in fact, it tells the story of a life on the margins of society in a no less disturbing way. While the filmmaker is reading quotes from conversations with an invalid man from eastern Germany, a mechanical ballet of light switches and plastic dolls is set in motion.

In this expression of gendered pain, joy, and hardship, Chick Strand collaborates with five women who share their experiences through direct, frank stories. Throughout these testimonies, Soft Fiction considers the identification and representation of womanhood, and the sense of possession and dispossession through consensual and abusive sexuality.

Made in 1993, when the Bosnian War was at its apex, this film compresses untold hours of action into two minutes. A static photograph is revisited once and again. Hail, Sarajevo is a morsel of history in and of itself.

llusions is a gripping critique of cinema’s power to shape perception, exploring the myth of racial identity. Julie Dash’s drama shows the instrumentalisation of Hollywood during wartime.

Blight revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. What is presented is simultaneously fact and fiction.

A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future. An element of childhood whimsy is integral to balancing out the film’s dark absurdism, paving the way for its core theme: life is precious, and the sadness permeating our day-to-day is a reminder to cherish it.

In this Second Wave Feminist pamphlet, Agnès Varda invites women, young and old, dressed and nude, proletarian and upper-class, to answer the question: What does it mean to be a woman?

A silent meditation on death depicting bodies lying in a morgue, this is one of the starkest works of body horror in which Brakhage makes the monster our very own perception.

Incident by a Bank is based on true facts and stages a surreal, failed bank robbery that the filmmaker himself witnessed in 2006, in central Stockholm. By constantly keeping the viewer at a sterile distance from the main action, Östlund slowly shifts the focus from the robbery to those witnessing the situation from a safe distance.

A tale of first love. Romeo and Polly sit in separate cars outside a pub, waiting for their parents. They're bored until they notice each other—at first, they bicker and play it cool, but by the time they have to say goodbye, the sparks of first love are flickering.

Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. Mast-del is a love song that would never pass through censorship.

Clips sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos traverse the twentieth century, focusing on the lives of Black people set against the backdrop of systemic racism and White supremacism. Taken as a whole, Jafa’s montage comprises a poignant, visceral meditation on African American identity and history.

1947’s Fireworks is a milestone, as the first American film with a gay narrative. At age seventeen, Anger himself plays the lead character. The film illustrates the awakening of a suppressed desire, a gross fantasy.

Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape.

A poetic amalgam of Yuri Norstein’s memories, hopes, and fears for the future. Tale of Tales depicts his post-war childhood, remnants of the personal tragedies of war, and the little wolf character in the lullaby his mother used to sing.

Using newsreel footage and a song by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off Now!, one of the most powerful bursts of 1960s propaganda. Made almost entirely from existing newsreel footage, the film tackled the pressing political issues of the time, from racism to imperialism.

Of the more than eighty moving-image works that Barbara Hammer created, her 1974 film Dyketactics remains her most iconic. A four-minute paean to lesbian sexuality, the film publicly announced Hammer’s blossoming sexual identity.

In this documentary-cum-survey made in 1979, basic existential questions are asked in the form of a street survey probe. Forty-four selected Poles, representing various professions and ranging in age from seven to a hundred years old, answer three questions: When were you born? Who are you? What do you want (in life)?

In 1954, on a Calais beach, Agnès Varda took a photograph of a man, a boy and a dead goat. Almost thirty years later, she returns to that image, the moment she made it, the way she remembers it (sometimes incorrectly, as she finds out), and the interconnections between past, present and future.

In a quarry, two boys become embroiled in a seemingly innocent power game with Mother Nature as their only spectator.

Brakhage’s avant-garde classic is an intimate impression of the birth of his first child. The film features the first contractions, the actual delivery, and the cutting of the umbilical cord.

Spacy elaborates the concept of ‘infinite regress’ through a zoom-in to a grandstand on which animated photos show a zoom of the same stand, ad infinitum, with reverses and variations. All its components—location, illusion, and time—are strictly combined in an endless cycle, like a Möbius strip or an Escher film, in a Japanese tempo, from slow to fast.

Ousmane Sembène’s first film uses a mixture of documentary and fiction techniques to tell the story of a young cart-driver in Dakar. The Wagoner illustrates the continent’s poverty, showing that independence has not solved the problems of its people.

This postmodern retelling of Karen Carpenter’s affliction by anorexia enraged her family and initially got the film banned. Blending archival material, artificial talking heads, and Barbie-doll reenactments, Todd Haynes criticises the objectification of female celebrities.

A polemical, avowedly personal video documentary on the American Black gay experience. Marlon Riggs celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act.

Norman McLaren applies the principles used to animate drawings or puppets to animate live actors. Neighbours is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. The political context shifts depending on the viewers’ personal positions.

Mati Diop’s experimental documentary Atlantiques is a precursor but also a narrative sidestep to what would become her feature debut, Atlantics, ten years later. A group of young Senegalese men discusses a possible attempt to cross the ocean to Spain.

In his contribution to the omnibus film RO.GO.PA.G (1963), Pier Paolo Pasolini depicts Orson Welles making a film about the crucifixion of Jesus, while he, the cast, and the crew behave quite unholy. La Ricotta is a short, apocalyptic tirade against the conventions of filmmaking and the unchristian coldness of contemporary Christianity.

One Week is the first independent film Buster Keaton released himself, full of new stunts in and around houses and on ladders.

Marguerite Duras takes us on a nighttime car ride through an unpopulated Paris in mid-August, in a single, uninterrupted shot from inside the car. From the end of night till dawn, a depopulated Paris soothes itself with Duras’ affecting voice-over, accompanied by cello accords.

In Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton presents 12 pictures and reminisces about them. After about a minute, the photos catch fire and burn to ashes. Memory and anticipation merge.

A girl from a shantytown travels to the city to become an itinerant newspaper vendor. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernising capital of Dakar.

In the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers, the kind-hearted, cheese-loving bachelor and inventor Wallace rents out his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic dog’s bedroom to a penguin.

What is Senegal exactly? Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen is a film about its people and, at the same time, a reflection on the conventions of ethnographic cinema. It shows the mechanisms of manipulation in the seventh art form.

As a heavy fog shrouds the wild woods, a helpless hedgehog starts wandering in the powdery mist. Will the young visitor find his way home? Hedgehog in the Fog has generated its own lore, and there is even a monument to the hedgehog in Kyiv.

In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity.

On a lonely planet, a musical is enacted in a modern marketplace. The employees of various commercial venues, portrayed as anthropomorphic animals, cope with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful showtunes.

Elephant is, without question, Alan Clarke’s bleakest film: a compilation of eighteen murders on the streets of Belfast, without explanatory narrative. After each killing, the camera dwells on the bodies, forcing the viewer to confront the brutality of their deaths.

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes. The Black Tower is an example of a film that succesfully plays with emotions and the language of film.

In 1967, Agnès Varda was living in California when one of the Black Panthers founders, Huey P. Newton, was arrested during a traffic stop for killing a police officer—a clear case of racial injustice, according to the Panthers. The following summer, Varda took her 16mm camera to a “Free Huey” demonstration in Oakland.

A man opens the large gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France, in 1895. Through the gate and a smaller door next to it, workers stream out for lunch. Once all the workers have left the factory, the gatekeeper closes the gate again.

At the outskirts of a city, a group of people stands around a lorry. Naked men, women, and children are herded in through the rear door of the vehicle. Once the door is locked, a gentleman takes a hose and connects it from the exhaust pipe to the lorry’s interior.

Isle of Flowers shows the cycles of modern life. Very soon, it becomes evident that something is rotten in the capitalist system as a whole. Since its release, the film has lost none of its visual significance or topicality.

The Vampires of Poverty is an action film masquerading as a documentary about filmmakers who exploit poverty for profit, with a touch of black humour, but most of all a scathing critique against ‘misery porn’ and the opportunism of those filmmakers who make ‘socio-political’ films in the Third World to make money and win prizes in Europe.

In Zero for Conduct, four rebellious pupils plan a revolt to take over the school. The film was first shown in Paris in 1933, but shocked so many viewers that it was subsequently banned from screens until the end of World War II.

A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. This beguiling allegory of innocence and transcendence is the only short film ever to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.

Made early in the prolific artist's nearly fifty-year career, The Inextinguishable Fire is a critique of the Vietnam War and the role of industry in the production of chemical weapons. In analysing the production, dissemination, and consumption of images, Harun Farocki reveals the inextricable links between media culture, politics, technology, and violence.

During his heyday, Buster Keaton was also known as The Great Stone Face. The American comedian is best known for his silent films, which focus on physical comedy and his deadpan facial expressions.

In The Seasons, Artavazd Pelechian captures a reclusive farming community in its incessant struggle against the elements of nature. The film shows humanity trapped in a cruel but stunningly beautiful existence.

Zbigniew Rybczynski worked eight hours a day for ten months on the Oscar-winning Tango. He brings together a jumble of cut-out photos featuring countless figures of all kinds and ages in a flawlessly synchronised animation. The work was formally highly innovative at the time.

Wasp follows a single mother too young to have four children, and too poor to feed them. This Oscar-winning short film was shot in Dartford, a south-east London working-class suburb, where filmmaker Andrea Arnold grew up.

Dimensions of Dialogue doesn’t present us with models of meaningful human understanding; on the contrary, we are given three examples which clearly demonstrate that communication can and will break down. During this 12-minute magnum opus, Jan Švankmajer demonstrates his virtuosity and limitless invention by shifting his artistic style and animation techniques three times.

The black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 has since become a canonical work. A Trip to the Moon was hugely popular upon its original release and used animation and visual effects that were very innovative at the time.

The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

In Outer Space, a woman no longer fights an unknown entity, but that portion of the filmstrip that is normally unseen when film is projected—the “outer space” of the film’s image, consisting of the optical soundtrack and its perforations.

Scorpio Rising is perhaps Kenneth Anger’s best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.

An authoritative voice-over pre-empts the events in the image, seeming to order not only the people, cars, and moving objects on the screen but also the actual camera movements on the street in view. John Smith draws attention to how controlling and directional the practice of voice-over actually is.

Wavelength consists of almost no action. The film’s spine is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph, until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.

Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams. Don’t get stuck on the plot. Buñuel deliberately omits chronology and opts for Freudian dream logic, in which scenes do not necessarily follow one another logically.

Alain Resnais combines poignant black-and-white archive footage of the Holocaust, such as mass graves and systematic destruction, with colour footage of the empty camp grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in 1955. Night and Fog raises critical questions about collective memory and the tendency to forget.

In 1962, beloved and controversial poetess Forugh Farrokhzad went to Azerbaijan and made her only short film: a portrait of a leper colony. The House is Black is an empathetic portrait that illuminates a world burdened by tragedy, yet sustained by community.

A woman, played by Maya Deren herself, returns home, falls asleep, and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and a complete mismatch with the objective view of time and space, the woman’s dark inner desires play out on-screen.

Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, La Jetée tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy period of conditioning, he is sent back in time, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier.