Joshua Simon

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer who used to make shorts. For fifteen years, he published a film magazine called Western.

Joshua Simon 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 Joshua Simon’s submission:

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
La Ricotta	Pier Paolo Pasolini	Italy	1963	34’
Saw it as a teenager and wanted to make films ever since...
Nicht löschbares Feuer The Inextinguishable Fire	Harun Farocki	Germany	1969	22’
You can return to it again and again to learn how to see.
Letter to Jane	Jean-Luc Godard , Jean Pierre Gorin	France	1972	52’
With all of its apparent flaws—a document of what meaning images have.
The Way Things Go Der Lauf der Dinge	Peter Fischli, David Weiss	Switzerland	1987	29’
Inventive, brilliant and funny
Der Schlamm Von Branst	Harald Thys, Jos de Gruyter	Belgium	2008	20’
Brilliant interplay between humans as objects and objects as objects.
Unsupported Transit	Zachary Formwalt	The Netherlands	2011	14’
A guide to navigating in the world.
The Immigrant	Charlie Chaplin	USA	1917	20’
Inventive and charming. Was made when Chaplin was the highest paid actor in the world. Got him in trouble 35 years later during the second Red Scare in the US...
Entr'acte	René Clair	France	1924	20’
Virtuosic and inventive collaboration of Picabia, Clair, Satie, Man Ray, Duchamp and more is a Dadaist masterpiece
Confessions	Roee Rosen	Israel	2008	57’
The first person narrator voice distributed and disembodied.
Beyond Guilt	Ruti Sela, Maayan Amir	Israel	2005	42’
A trilogy on sexuality and violence playing out power relations around the camera