Got five minutes? Enjoy a flash of cinematic inspiration with these dazzling shorts. Check back monthly for new selections!
Directed by Arie Esiri • 2018 • United States
Presented here is a short made by Arie Esiri in 2018 for the fashion brand Maki Oh. Shot on celluloid at night in Lagos, Nigeria, the film has eerie postapocalyptic and Afrofuturist overtones.
Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2021 • United States
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya Maya Street-Sachs at ages six, sixteen, and twenty-four. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle—clockwise—as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the stra...
Directed by Lewie Kloster and Noah Kloster • 2016 • United States
Starring Christine Choy
Faced with endlessly rising cigarette prices in New York, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Christine Choy goes to extralegal lengths to procure her favorite brand.
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1986 • France
Starring Isabelle Adjani
Isabelle Adjani narrates an architectural tribute to the Cinémathèque française on its fiftieth anniversary.
Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 2000 • Hong Kong
This 2000 short film by Wong Kar Wai was made entirely out of print elements discovered in a California warehouse. It is set to Zhou Xuan’s song “Hua yang de nian hua.”
Directed by Caroline Monnet • 2015 • Canada
Assembled from archival footage of Canada’s First Nations peoples and cut to a pulse-quickening electronic soundtrack, MOBILIZE is a breathless journey from the northern woods to the tops of New York skyscrapers, almost all of which have been construct...
Directed by Akosua Adoma Owusu • 2012 • United States
Playful yet powerful, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s SPLIT ENDS, I FEEL WONDERFUL focuses on African American women’s hair, spinning found footage of 1970s New York hair salons and hairstyles into a dense collage of gesture and image.
Directed by Ken Jacobs • 2009 • United States
Avant-garde titan Ken Jacobs captures a candid moment with Jonas Mekas “dawdling in the cosmos.”
Directed by Mati Diop and Manon Lutanie • 2015 • France, Canada
Starring Jules Langlade
A boy channels his inner Michael Jackson in this experimental dance film set to a pulsing electro-pop beat.
Directed by David Lynch • 1968 • United States
This experimental short film presents a sick woman's nightmare involving living representations of the alphabet.