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Begone Dull Care
Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren & Evelyn Lambart, 1949)

    Begone Dull Care

    Evelyn Lambart, Norman McLaren, Canada, 1949, 8’

    A vivid interpretation of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio. Begone Dull Care brings a wild piece of music to life with abstract expressionist animation. It captures the energy of the piece in visual form. Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip, impossible to simulate with digital tools. 

    Bio Norman McLaren

    Norman McLaren (1914-1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas, including drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation, and graphical sound. His awards included an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1952 for Neighbours, a Silver Bear for best short documentary at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival, and a 1969 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Pas de deux.

    I want to tell the viewer about my inner feelings, but I don’t want to tell the viewer about my inner thoughts and opinions—you know, intellectualising. In Begone Dull Care, I’m telling them how I feel about that music.

    Norman McLaren
    La Jetée
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    “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025

    02.02.2026

    As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

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    401
    • This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025
      voted by Tam Dan Vu, Juan Barquin, Per Fikse, Pavel Horáček
    animation experimental avant-garde

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    Working Knowledge of Ritual

    Hannan Jones, Australia, 2023, 4’

    By interweaving esoteric texts and images, Working Knowledge of Ritual underscores the interconnectedness of spirituality and nature. The film muses on our energies alongside the natural world, inspired by the writings of Leonard Jones.

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    In Curve Notes _ Stream

    Flavia Regaldo, Portugal, 2023, 7’

    Hand-painted watercolours explore bodies, desire, and the tension between both in this experimental animated film. Due to an explosion of colour and movement that escapes classical animation, an unusual sensorial force is achieved. Alternating colours, lines, and density, the drawings question pornography and normative sexuality.

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    Red Giant

    Anne Verbeure, Belgium, 2021, 11’

    Day and night, a giant sits on a hill, far away from his smaller fellow man. He fills his days organising things and making sure everything is in the right place at the right time.

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    Swollen Stigma

    Sarah Pucill, United Kingdom, 1998, 21’

    Swollen Stigma is a visual, surrealistic narrative about a woman travelling both literally and psychically through several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman, fill her imagination. The film proposes lesbian imagery, and its shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces, and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external.

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    Yarokamena

    Andrés Jurado, Colombia, Portugal, 2022, 21’

    In 20th-century Colombia, resistance fighter Yarokamena, a member of the indigenous Uitoto tribe, called for rebellion against violent exploitation of the rubber mining industry in the Amazone and invoked the spiritual powers of war.

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    Old Child

    Elettra Bisogno, Hazem Alqaddi, Belgium, Palestine, 2019, 16’

    Old Child depicts the fragmented story of Hazem, who had to flee Gaza. Throughout this stream-of-consciousness montage of dreams and reminiscences, he searches for order but also for the beauty he left behind.

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    Snow Edge

    Juan Francisco Rodríguez, Colombia, 2021, 15’

    The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.

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    elephantfish

    Meltse Van Coillie, Belgium, 2018, 27’

    A ship drifts in the middle of an endless sea. Aboard is a crew of five. They all cope with boredom — some by trying to overpower it; others by escaping into a parallel world guided by dreams.

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