Vincent Förster

Vincent Förster 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 Vincent Förster’s submission:

A very beautiful initiative and love declaration to the short form format that is impossible to fulfil, simply because there is too many brilliant and wonderful short films out there. It perhaps even undermines what the format stands for: Being underground, experimental, and not made to work within the dynamics of our leoliberal economy of attention. At the same time, the format clearly deserves a stronger lobby, a big audience and I'm sure what will come out of this is a beautiful resource to get to know many more films that I don't know yet, but definitely need to watch.

— Vincent Förster

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
8	Anaïs Tohé Commaret	France	2022	22’
Since there's no place for young (Black) people in reality, they have to invent their own one. Visually outstanding, the film is not reproducing already existing images, but tries to invent its own cinematic language. The play with reality and hyper-reality is as captivating as it is challenging for audiences, but that is what makes it exciting. Very unique, very different, very intuitively apt. Takes risks in the right places; if it were more perfect, it would lose its magic. It stayed with me for a long time.
Past Perfect	Jorge Jácome	Portugal	2019	23’
In a world obsessed with progress, the film is a lyrical meditation on time, and time lost - or won. In its playful meandering between the real and the imagined, Jácome uses the short form perfectly to mourn the things that have been. Unapologetically nostalgic, but acutely self-aware, the sound-design guides us through a hauntingly beautiful landscape of memories that linger well into the present.
Maria Schneider, 1983	Elisabeth Subrin	France	2021	25’
More of a resurrection than a re-enactment. With incredible formal precision in its repetitions and variations, Subrin crafts a hauntingly hypnotic rhythm that draws us into the the emotional architecture of one specific moment in time. Through its tender performances, the films transcends a mre portrait of a woman reckoning with trauma, and becomes a collective invocation of all those who suffer(ed) under the oppressive machineries of patriarchy.
Ten Minutes Older Vecāks par 10 minūtēm	Hertz Frank	Soviet Union	1978	10’
A film so radically simple without ever being simplistic that it's emotional depth is almost unbelievable. Frank unfolds an almost philosophical study of the nature of perception with this single shot inverting the gaze to what it is that cinema does to us: a symphony of emotions.
Borom sarret The Wagoner	Ousmane Sembène	France, Senegal	1963	18’
A quietly devastating portrait of postcolonial disillusionment, Sembène captures the weight of systemic injustice and the contradictions of a society caught between tradition and modernity through the eyes of a Cart Driver in post-independence Dakar. A powerful reminder of cinema's power to witness, question, and remember.
Nuit et brouillard Night and Fog	Alain Resnais	France	1955	32’

Two Cars, One Night	Taika Waititi	New Zealand	2003	12’

I Like Life A Lot Nekem az élet tecck nagyon	Kati Macskássy	Hungary	1977	9’

Black Panthers	Agnès Varda	France	1968	28’

A Bird Flew Un pájaro voló	Leinad Pájaro De la Hoz	Colombia, Cuba	2024	20’
An extraordinary film, a portrait not only of masculinity, but also of a feeling, of a state of being. The gentle gaze with which the camera explores men in mourning, an uncanny atmosphere and a marvellous soundscape create a complex and profound cinematic space that allows for the slow development of an emotional state that gives a sense of what grief feels like. A very sensual and physical film about the fragility of bodies that need to function like machines in a society that knows no time to pause and put life on hold, not even in the face of tragedy, the film transports a sentiment that especially resonates after the collective experience of the pandemic years.