Waleska Antunes is a film curator at the Festival de Brasília de Cinema Brasileiro and the Lumen Film Festival - Rio de Janeiro Independent Film Festival, and a film programmer at SESC/PR. She is a writer at Multiplot! Magazine and participant of Berlinale Talents Press (2024).
Waleska Antunes
Waleska Antunes 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 Waleska Antunes’s submission:
It was a really hard task to choose the greatest short films of all time, because “all time” is such a long and vast concept. Some shorts are not included here (like Meshes of the Afternoon, Zéro de Conduite, and Wavelength) because I consider them hors-concours — they stand apart from lists and rankings altogether. I tried to encompass works that are not exactly part of a canon written in stone, but rather of a personal one.
— Waleska Antunes| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Window Water Baby Moving | Stan Brakhage | USA | 1959 | 13’ | ||
It is a movie but foremost a myth of creation. Window Water Baby Moving puts all the earthly and spiritual things in motion all at once: the materiality of water and the light coming out of the window, the baby moving in a belly, the smile of a couple welcoming their first child, the touch of the hand, the blood flowing in the water, the scream we cannot hear. The smiles of Jane Wodening and Stan Brakhage and their bewilderment of a kid being born captured for the first time without mediation of the outside world must be one of the most beautiful miracles that cinema can offer to us. |
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| Brasil | Rogério Sganzerla | Brazil | 1981 | 13’ | ||
Brasil, a short film about the recording of a João Gilberto album, blends songs and archival images, scenes of Rio de Janeiro, and an intimate, magnificent vision of the Brazilian popular imagination. There’s an interview in which Rogério Sganzerla discusses his upbringing. He was born in a small town in the Brazilian countryside, and he says that it’s both a curse and a blessing to have such an origin. A curse, because having an average origin is far worse than having a bad one; and a blessing, because such smallness allows one to see that the world is much larger than we can conceive. The images in Brasil reveal this — only a gaze so keen and so determined to discover the world could hold such tenderness and sensitivity in a film. |
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| Respite Aufschub | Harun Farocki | Germany, South Korea | 2007 | 40’ | ||
Hollis Frampton says that “a film is a machine made of images”. This sentence applies perfectly to Harun Farocki’s films. Aufschub is no exception; it shows how a film is a machine made of images, and how this machine is perverse and its images, haunting. |
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| Watersmith | Will Hindle | USA | 1969 | 32’ | ||
A horror movie made entirely of water and the rhythm of bodies swimming. It seems the evil brother of Taris, Roi De l’Eau (1931) by Jean Vigo. |
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| Space Noise | Takashi Makino | Japan | 2015 | 30’ | ||
Most of the experiences with 3D images are kinda frustrating or even underwhelming. The only one who offered something so astonishing and a great use of 3D before, probably was Jean-Luc Godard with Adieu Au Langage. The mix of 3D abstract images with 16mm and live-soundtrack shift the perception on what we consider expanded cinema and questions the whole act of being in a movie theater. |
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| So Is This | Michael Snow | Canada | 1982 | 49’ | ||
Choosing Wavelength as one of the greatest short films of all the time is obviously not enough - it IS one of the greatest films ever made. Period. That being said, Annette Michelson wrote "The Art of Moving Shadows" and she speaks about Letter to Jane, by Jean Luc Godard: "Letter to Jane (…) presents a critical analysis of a still single image, subjecting the photograph to an intensive ideological interrogation, completes a historical cycle. In so doing, it once again frame the question: when is a film a movie? Or: what is cinema?" Michael Snow does the same, telling jokes one word at the time. |
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| Take Off | Gunvor Nelson | USA | 1972 | 10’ | ||
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at its best. It starts as an act of voyeurism and it ends as an evisceration. |
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| Gloria! | Hollis Frampton | USA | 1979 | 10’ | ||
A cryptogram for conjuring the dead. |
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| No No Nooky T.V. | Barbara Hammer | USA | 1987 | 12’ | ||
"A computer can never be spiteful or horny, therefore a computer must never make art". Except if it is an AMIGA in the hands of Barbara Hammer. |
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| Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes | Phil Solomon | USA | 1999 | 3’ | ||
Love is the universal language and if someone does a movie as a way to celebrate their loved ones, it has to be one of the greatest movies ever made. |
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