Tendai Mutambu is a writer, editor, curator, and film programmer based in London and Barcelona. His work centres on contemporary artists’ moving image and the essay film, with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and diasporic practices. He is a programmer for the European Media Arts Festival and was recently a Development Editing Fellow for Logic(s), a queer Black and Asian technology magazine at Columbia University’s INCITE Institute, and an associate producer of Aura Satz’s feature-length documentary Preemptive Listening (2024).
Tendai Mutambu
Tendai Mutambu 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 Tendai Mutambu’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handsworth Songs | John Akomfrah | United Kingdom | 1986 | 59’ | ||
| Meshes of the Afternoon | Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren | USA | 1946 | 14’ | ||
| Twilight City | Reece Auguiste | United Kingdom | 1989 | 52’ | ||
| Christmas at Moose Factory | Alanis Obomsawin | Canada | 1971 | 13’ | ||
| Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death | Arthur Jafa | USA | 2017 | 8’ | ||
| Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik Workers Leaving the Factory | Harun Farocki | Germany | 1995 | 36’ | ||
| Monangambeee Monangambé | Sarah Maldoror | Angola | 1968 | 18’ | ||
| Bastion Point: Day 507 | Merata Mita, Leon Narbey, Gerd Pohlmann | New Zealand | 1978 | 27’ | ||
| La petite vendeuse de soleil The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun | Djibril Diop Mambéty | France, Senegal, Switzerland | 1999 | 45’ | ||
| A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere | Martine Syms | USA | 2015 | 24’ | ||