Joanna Baranowska

Peel is every emerging filmmaker's dream—a film with no budget wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes. For the viewer, however, it is something they don't know they needed—Peel challenges with its extraordinary triangular composition and its defiance of genre conventions. The snapshots from a family car ride have a gut-wrenching quality of truth about emotional ugliness. There is no tenderness here, nor is there cruelty—there is a raw camera and momentary haunting disruptions. Peel is a perfect example that "short" really means "sharp." Watch in daylight.

Tango could be synonymous with horror vacui and masterful craft. As many interpretations as eye movements of a viewer trying to keep up with the characters' repetitive actions—you may want to focus on counting and analyzing them, but the pleasure of being possessed by it will win. When asked what Tango means, the director himself answers: Absolutely nothing. Only in short form, resistant to the pompous demands of ossified film traditions, is such artistic audacity and cubist disciplined ambition possible as in Tango. A film the viewer wants to devour, and that devours in return.

Before the feature-length A Short Film About Love was made, there was this episode of the Dekalog series. The TV series episode format not only meets the definition of a short, but works as a short should—straight to the heart and gut, except that unlike traditional shorts, a series episode has enormous reach and deadly effectiveness. Telling the story of a brief exchange between voyeur and the observed, Kieślowski performed a vivisection of the audience. Every viewer peeps at the unknown, and that arouses. No one wants it known that they are aroused, but everyone knows anyway, because everyone experiences the same thing. Kieślowski absolves the viewer, but warns creators: filmmaking carries great responsibility, because you never know how fragile your audience is, so you cannot be careless. The most important reminder that acts of looking and putting something on the screen are always invasive and always have moral consequences.

Light, shadow and perspective are the alphabet of film, and Anger gives the spectator a brief and concentrated lesson in seeing. Starting with the fundamentals—it is between light and shadow that movement is created, the very substance of cinema. And for filmmakers this is a crucial lesson—a reminder that film is as much technical as it is subversive, and that one cannot exist without the other. Take the camera and show what you see, simply. And have humility, because it is the spectator and their eye who are the true filmmakers.

An introduction to the art of filmmaking, not just short films: A film that insists that without honest intentions and sincere commitment there is no film. Pasolini always proves that being radical means being rooted, anchored by a strong moral compass. With that foundation, a filmmaker can never go too far in speaking about what matters - like Pasolini.

Sampling and preaching, erratic yet precise. Once in a Lifetime might just be the perfect all-encompassing short moving picture.