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.
-
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.