Kim Torres is a Costa Rican director and screenwriter who creates intimate, immersive stories that tenderly explore the passage of time. Her films have been presented in official selections at Cannes, New York Film Festival, Locarno, San Sebastian, MoMA, Lincoln Center, and the Eye Filmmuseum, among others.
Kim Torres
Kim Torres 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 Kim Torres’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Bread and Alley نان و کوچه | Abbas Kiarostami | Iran | 1970 | 12’ | ||
| Flores Flores | Jorge Jácome | Portugal | 2017 | 26’ | ||
| Disintegration 93-96 | Miko Revereza | USA | 2017 | 6’ | ||
Six intense and complex minutes that made me feel so much. Miko’s voice —melancholic and forceful, severe yet loving— becomes a lullaby that carries us through the images of the family archive. There are huge ideas packed into a short time (migration, emotional colonization, the projection of happiness and how a family’s history is recorded, love-hate toward one’s parents), and somehow it works incredibly well that way, leaving us breathless until the final moment when the film’s title appears. |
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| Passing Time | Terence Davies | Belgium, United Kingdom | 2023 | 3’ | ||
In a single shot, reading a poem against a landscape near his home, Terence renders a most beautiful good-bye. "There is a place called silence" he says, "where no hope or harm can be." |
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| The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins | Les Blank, Skip Gerson | USA | 1968 | 31’ | ||
| One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train Cien niños esperando un tren | Ignacio Agüero | Chile, United Kingdom | 1988 | 57’ | ||
| A Letter to Uncle Boonmee จดหมายถึงลุงบุญมี | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand, Germany, United Kingdom | 2009 | 18’ | ||
A delicate piece that gently weaves political memory and the memory of spirits. |
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| He Who Eats Children | Ben Russell | USA, Suriname | 2016 | 25’ | ||
| The Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli | Assia Djebar | Algeria | 1983 | 57’ | ||
| La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory | Louis Lumière | France | 1895 | 1’ | ||