Tam Dan Vu

With a BA in Cultural and Media Production Strategies, Tam is a cinephile who seeks to bridge film to its audience. In 2013, she fell in love with a short film at Québec Cinéma. Through an internship at H264, she was invited to contribute to the genesis of Plein(s) Écran(s)—the world’s first film festival on Facebook—where she evolved as coordinator, communications director, and programmer. Leveraging her creativity in digital marketing, she oversaw the social media campaigns for the Oscar© race of three shorts that got nominated—Fauve, Marguerite, and Brotherhood. In 2020, she joined Travelling Distribution as Artistic Director and Head of Communications. Tam also works as a freelance short film programmer and is developing a practice as a multidisciplinary artist and found-footage filmmaker.

Tam Dan Vu 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 Tam Dan Vu’s submission:

i realize there are many gaps in these picks - i mean it’s kind of overwhelming to choose and the definition of “greatest” is very relative - so honestly i just went selfishly with shorts i was dying to see on the final list.

i guess what these 10 films all have in common is that they show a deep understanding of the short film format at its core (and value!) – whether conceptually / ontologically or in the way they choose to invest the creative space it offers... with agility, formal innovation, and of course, play!

— Tam Dan Vu

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
Mothlight	Stan Brakhage	USA	1963	4’
The most a short filmmaker has ever short-filmmade... Both medium and duration-specific, simple yet conceptually whole—an achingly beautiful film about cinema, about life itself.
MY BBY 8L3W	NEOZOON	Germany	2014	3’
Essential work from internet-age found footage pioneers Neozoon Collective. Hilarious, ruthless and snappy with its 3 minute-mark, all while achieving to lay down all that needs to be said about humanity in the digital age and what we have come to as a species. If aliens came down to earth, this is the film I would show them.
The Devil Diabeł	Jan Bujnowski	Poland	2022	16’
Surprise is the best feeling you can get when watching a short. Genre-bending yet modest, the way this (student!) film pulls off tonal shifts in only 16 minutes and subverts narrative expectations to deliver such a thought-provoking ending leaves the viewer in wonder as the credits are rolling. A true sleight of hands. The best shorts are the ones that push us closer to the cliff’s edge of the endless possibilities in storytelling, especially the ones yet to be explored.
8	Anaïs Tohé Commaret	France	2023	23’
Cinema of experience at its best. A unique object of a film—emollient in its form, textured in its universe, disorienting in its play with time and space—a spellbinding, hypnotic meditation on the politics of dreaming that places its suburban protagonists at the center stage. Bored and forgotten, these young girls long for an elsewhere, and so is the film, as it deliberately attempts to slip away from its viewer…
Martin Cries Martin pleure	Jonathan Vinel	France	2017	16’
Seminal and enduring Machinima short with a cult following—and for good reason—this work of composition sets the example in the art of investing its medium to the fullest extent, achieving formal innovation without ever shying away from emotional weight—and the result is poignant, devastatingly transcendent.
Sierra Sierra	Sander Joon	Estonia	2022	16’
As quirky as it is clever, an animation short unfolding with unblinking formal playfulness and generous amounts of wholesome tenderness. This film could end hunger and bring world peace.
Elephant	Alan Clarke	United Kingdom	1989	37’
Silence carries weight in this brutally simple and arresting film that delivers one of the boldest and most disturbing depictions of violence in cinema. Forcibly stripped bare in its form and storytelling, and yet it speaks volumes—especially at the time this was released. An ice-cold slap in the face.
Begone Dull Care	Evelyn Lambart , Norman McLaren	Canada	1949	8’
Colors! Jazz! Movement! Groundbreaking, unfettered, whimsical—a tonic, cartwheeling feast for the senses in one of the most potent and delightful encounters between music and cinema—what’s not to like?
Suddenly TV قناة فجأة	Roopa Gogieni	Sudan, Qatar	2022	19’
Radically urgent and politically necessary at its core, yet lively and pulsating in its tone, this defiant film invests its framework with drive and purpose as its subjects seize the camera and tell their own stories in real time. A tactical, meaningful use of short-filmmaking’s accessible and agile nature as a tool for resistance and self-determination - and a fuck you to mainstream media erasure and propaganda.
Bold Eagle	Whammy Alcazaren	Philippines	2022	17’
No, I won’t explain.