Wim Vanacker

Wim Vanacker is a consultant, creative advisor, programmer, curator, and tutor for many workshops, film festivals, and projects in development. He’s a member of the selection committee for the Official Short Film Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. Vanacker works as an editorial consultant for the First Cut Lab, and he’s the curator and editing consultant of the Works-in-Progress Showcase as part of the Red Sea Souk in the context of the Red Sea International Film Festival.

Wim Vanacker 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 Wim Vanacker’s submission:

An impossible task. Tried to avoid an overly present recency effect, but ended up with the exact opposite, a list of "classics" and "classics" only. But while delving into the world of "classics", I did try to avoid the obvious picks as much as I could. Not a given.

— Wim Vanacker
Movie Original Title Director Country Year Duration
La Jetée Chris Marker France 1962 28’
Rendezvous C'était un rendez-vous Claude Lelouch France 1976 9’
Tongues Untied Marlon Riggs USA 1989 55’
Elephant Alan Clarke United Kingdom 1989 37’
Nuit et brouillard Night and Fog Alain Resnais France 1955 32’
Meshes of the Afternoon Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren USA 1946 14’
The Blood of a Poet Le sang d'un poète Jean Cocteau France 1932 55’
The War Game Peter Watkins United Kingdom 1966 48’
Simon of the Desert Simón del desierto Luis Buñuel Mexico 1965 45’
A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist Peter Greenaway United Kingdom 1978 42’