Ilinca Vânău

Ilinca Vânău is a film curator and writer living in Edinburgh, originally from Transylvania, Romania. She is a pre-selector for the documentary strand at the Cork International Film Festival in Ireland, and has worked as a programmer at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival on the Scottish-English border. Ilinca holds a degree in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews, where she is currently completing her PhD thesis, researching sound and posthumanism across a constellation of recent narrative, artists’ moving-image, and installation works.

Ilinca Vânău 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 Ilinca Vânău’s submission:

Glad to be joining the chorus! Lists as murmurations, mixtapes, dowsing rods? Before I ever studied film, film found me by chance through Chris Marker’s prophecies, Jonas Mekas’ glimpses, and Loie Fuller's serpentine dances. I began the list with those, but then they dissolved without disappearing, leading me to these ten films, most likely through a tombola of gratitude and forgetfulness. Only “greatest” because, to me, they share in the communal love and passion of many more/very few, holding the world together (to invoke James Baldwin). My comments are just brief personal notes, the works themselves gesture far deeper.

— Ilinca Vânău

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
Bouquets 11-20	Rose Lowder	France	2011	11’
Rose of Miraflores. Portals to shifts in perception. I wish I had more chances to spend and bend time with all of her astonishing work, in 16mm projections on warm evenings.
Last Things	Deborah Stratman	USA	2023	50’
A hushed human presence amid the clamour of nonhuman life. I am drawn to Stratman’s listening, to the sharp political diagnosis and divination in all of her love letters to short film form, from the 44-second film How Among the Frozen Worlds, to her masterpiece The Illinois Parables, to the magnetic ending of In Order not to be There.
Mille soleils A Thousand Suns	Mati Diop	France, Senegal	2013	45’
A last scene that is emblematic of Mati Diop’s way of peering through the veil of reality to see the fantasy of this world. Such a beautiful way of paying tribute to family ties, to the honesty of an inner quest, and the vividness of Touki Bouki.
Tale of Tales Сказка сказок	Yuri Norstein	Soviet Union	1979	29’
Tango, an apple, a little grey wolf - little more is closer to my childhood and daydreaming. Their other animations as well as Yarbusova’s picture books are real treasures.
Rite of Spring	Mona Vătămanu, Florin Tudor	Romania	2010	8’
Children set poplar fluff on fire! An astonishing silent spell and warning and protest, among a larger, profound body of work on the politics of memory and traces of ideology in space and matter.
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death	Arthur Jafa	USA	2017	8’
Moving and sobering work that throws me in a whirlwind of feeling. Fred Moten, whose work always accompanies me, spoke of the entanglement of absolute joy and absolute pain in every moment of the film and said, “it’s good that it lasts only seven minutes, because that’s as much as anyone can take.”
Beirut, My City Beyrouth, Ma Ville	Jocelyne Saab	Lebanon, France	1983	38’
A haunting opening scene I keep close to my heart, and which speaks to Jocelyne Saab’s incredible spirit, alive in the trilogy and resonant across all her life’s work.
We Մենք	Artavazd Peleshian	Armenia	1969	26’
Moving shots of mountains and tidal, musical collectives - so much fiery tenderness in Peleshian’s rhythms and in his love for the mystery of existence. I am drawn to the simultaneous distance and proximity of his work to Sergei Parajanov’s worlds.
Les Mains négatives	Marguerite Duras	France	1978	14’
Out-takes become a short film that reaches (in) through the abyss of time in an ostensibly simple, immediately overwhelming way. The parallel motions of the traveling shot, looped violin and Duras’ writing/reading make me feel this great pressure, as if I’m suddenly underwater or underground, and also make me take on a shape I don’t quite know.
Stuf	Titus Mesaros	Romania	1966	10’
An outro choice in honour of the ways in which films can charm you completely even when you insist they don’t quite work. Donkeys and people move across frozen river to gather reeds in the Danube delta. The drama of the music clashes with some of the most magical images I’ve ever seen; a failed propaganda film, shot in a place I love.