Ruun Nuur

Ruun Nuur is an independent cinematic practitioner with a diasporic gaze hyper-focused on the Black and Muslim peoples. She is the co-founder of No Evil Eye Cinema, a radical nomadic microcinema, and the Documentary Programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Nuur is an organisational leader whose work resides at the intersection of cinema, research, and accessible programming, with a mission to ignite the moving image and its audiences to deeply consider and connect.

Ruun Nuur 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 Ruun Nuur’s submission:

I’m still processing what it means to participate in something as simultaneously serious and unserious as a canon. Lists like these are less about verdicts and more about conversation...or perhaps an ongoing exercise in curiosity and perceived excellence. My great hope is that we all keep watching more short films, across eras, languages, and lineages, and stay grateful to be living in a time when cinema — in all its forms — is more accessible, shareable, and democratized than ever before :) <3

— Ruun Nuur

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
Seashell Aleel	Abdulkadir Ahmed Said	Somalia, Italy	1992	23’
A haunting and stunning ecological allegory and cornerstone of Somali cinema, Aleel (Seashell) evokes memory and myth through sound and sea, asserting film as a vessel of environmental and cultural consciousness... and power of making during times of conflict.
They Do Not Exist ليس لهم وجود	Mustafa Abu Ali	Palestine	1974	26’
Made in defiance of Golda Meir’s claim that “there were no such things as the Palestinians,” They Do Not Exist is both document and declaration. Filmed under siege in Lebanon by Mustafa Abu Ali and a small collective that included Sulafa Jadallah—one of the first Arab women behind the camera—the film captures the rhythms of refugee life and the persistence of resistance. Salvaged from the ruins of Beirut and later screened clandestinely in Jerusalem, where Abu Ali was “smuggled” in to attend, the film endures as both testimony and act of survival. “We used to say ‘Art for the Struggle,’” he reflected that night, “now it’s ‘Struggle for the Art.’”
The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast	Forugh Farrokzhad	Iran	1963	22’

The Eloquent Peasant شكاوى الفلاح الفصيح	Shadi Abdel Salam	Egypt	1970	21’
Adapting a 4,000-year-old tale, Abdel Salam crafts a timeless parable of justice and eloquence, fusing ancient Egyptian art and modern cinematic language.
Borom sarret The Wagoner	Ousmane Sembène	France, Senegal	1963	18’

America	Garrett Bradley	USA	2019	30’
I will never forget seeing this film at its world premiere at Sundance and being completely gobsmacked. I still feel utterly grateful for the opportunity to witness to such a phenomenal piece of moving image and live in the same timeline as Garrett Bradley.
Meshes of the Afternoon	Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren	USA	1946	14’

Black Panthers	Agnès Varda	France	1968	28’
Varda captures the 1968 Oakland rallies for Huey P. Newton with vivid immediacy, merging radical politics with her singular humanist lens. One of thee greatest visual time capsules that are still cited and used to educate the masses on the impact of the Black Panther Party.
Something Good – Negro Kiss	William Nicholas Selig	USA	1898	1’
Rediscovered and restored in 2017, this brief kiss between Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown is one of cinema’s earliest and most tender portrayals of Black intimacy.
Cycles	Zeinabu Irene Davis	USA	1989	17’