Very Short Films (under 10 minutes!)

Very Short Films (under 10 minutes!)

Short on time? On your phone? Watch a short film! Here's a collection of some of OVID's favorites that are under 10 minutes. Includes films by Jane Campion, Chris Marker, Marlon Riggs and Lynne Sachs.

Subscribe Share
Very Short Films (under 10 minutes!)
  • Jane Campion: Peel

    Directed by Jane Campion • Drama • 1982 • 9 minutes

    On a hot Australian summer's day, a recalcitrant, freckled, red-headed family of three go on a Sunday drive in the country. Their outing results in an intrigue of awesome belligerence.

    Cannes, Golden Palm for Best Short Film

  • Cat Listening to Music

    Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1994 • 3 minutes

    Marker fans are familiar with the cartoon representation of Guillaume-en-Egypte, Marker's beloved pet cat, which has become the reclusive filmmaker's alter ego. In this charming short, Marker reveals the real-life Guillaume, stretched out...

  • Teat Beat of Sex: Kirby EP 1

    Directed by Signe Baumane • Animation • 2008 • 2 minutes

    A take on sex exclusively from a woman's point of view. Episode 1 "Kirby". A woman discusses her feelings about… size.

  • 575 Castro St.

    Directed by Jenni Olson • Documentary • With Harvey Milk • 2008 • 7 minutes

    575 Castro St. reveals the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera Store set for Gus Van Sant's Oscar-winning feature film Milk. These mundane shots are almost bereft of movement and sound. So quiet,...

  • Anthem

    Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1991 • 8 minutes

    Marlon Riggs' experimental music video politicizes the homoeroticism of African-American men. With images—sensual, sexual, and defiant—and words intended to provoke, Anthem reasserts the self-evident right to life and liberty in an era of...

  • A Game of Three Halves - Episode 1

    Directed by Matthew Bate • Animation • 2021 • 4 minutes

    Sports journalist, podcaster and week-end player Max Rushden, hilariously ruminates on the frustrastions, disasters and joys of spending his weekends organising and playing amateur Sunday league football. From surviving apocalyptic microcli...

  • Christmas with Chávez

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2013 • 2 minutes

    Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and delivered his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. After that speech, Bush was officially a lame duck—the Republicans lost the House and...

  • Marx for Beginners

    Directed by Bob Godfrey • Animation • 1978 • 6 minutes

    How many people have actually read the work of Karl Marx? Based on the book by the Mexican cartoonist Rius, MARX FOR BEGINNERS is a hilarious animated film that highlights Marx's most influential ideas, and places them into the context of we...

  • Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 3 minutes

    River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a vice president who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to...

  • The Window and the Door

    Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • 2023 • 3 minutes

    This phantasmagoric film derives from a roll of 16mm film that Koestenbaum shot on a Bolex in Brooklyn, as well as analog 35mm photographs (self-portraits and cityscapes) he took on a Nikon. In this collage film/video, “The Window an...

  • London Can Take It!

    Directed by Humphrey Jennings & Harry Watt • Documentary • 1940 • 10 minutes

    Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt’s famous film, produced at the GPO film unit, is an enduring example of British self-mythology and rousing evidence of the artistic potential of supposed propaganda. A hymn to the Britis...

  • Paris, a Winter's Day

    Directed by Guy Gilles • Documentary • 1962 • 10 minutes

    This is a love letter to living in Paris — even on a bitterly cold winter’s day. Interspersed with shots of the city, we hear from Parisians, including a group of boys on the joys of pelting passers-by with snowballs, and a 73-year-old who...

  • What Rules the Invisible

    Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2022 • 10 minutes

    What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows trop...

  • In Our Nature

    Directed by Sara Leavitt • Documentary • 2019 • 3 minutes

    Moving from the country to the city, IN OUR NATURE is about the disconnection from the environment one experiences while in urban areas. Inspired by D.A. Pennebaker's DAYBREAK EXPRESS, the film takes the viewer on a road trip that encompa...

  • Starfish Aorta Colossus

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 5 minutes

    Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. ...

  • wüstenspringmaus

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2002 • 3 minutes

    "'The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy...' The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet." —International Film Festival Rotterdam

  • el güero

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2001 • 3 minutes

    "A refreshing look at karaoke, psychedelic dance moves, and donuts all mashed together into a small and swinging film about a man who considers his private thoughts and private jokes worth sharing with a large audience. And it’s unlikely that...

  • New Inspiration - Floor Falls

    Directed by Jennifer Paterson, Lewis Gourlay, Abby Warrilow • Documentary • 2021 • 3 minutes

    Floor Falls is a collaboration between award winning film makers Lewis Gourlay and Abby Warrilow of Cagoule and aerial dance choreographer Jennifer Paterson of All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre, featur...

  • Success

    Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2014 • 3 minutes

    Filmed in Times Square, this short film presents a dystopian vision of urban life in which the celebration of high-finance rewrites the topography of the city, while landscapes and indigenous cultures have been entrapped by a hyperbo...

  • comunista!

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2001 • 4 minutes

    "You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional." —Cinematexas Festival

  • And Then We Marched

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2017 • 4 minutes

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the first Women’s March in 2017 in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar act...

  • Callas and Spinoza

    Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Francesco Gagliardi • 2023 • 4 minutes

    Shot in Koestenbaum’s painting studio, with a backdrop of 16mm film strips hanging from the wall, and a painted, silver-foil-decorated bureau-on-wheels, this playful short film explores a famous moment from...

  • Great Man and Cinema

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 4 minutes

    Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title "Great Man and Cinema" comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how th...

  • Bullfight in Okinawa

    Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1994 • 4 minutes

    Two enormous black bulls engage in a contest of brute force, egged on by their screaming handlers, as they butt heads and lock horns in an attempt to rout their opponent. Part of Chris Marker's Bestiary.