The Best Short Films to Watch Absolutely

Short films have always been the training ground for young directors who are starting their independent film career. Conventionally, all films that last less than 40 minutes are considered short films, according to the Academy who awards the Oscar. 

Directors almost always start by producing their own short films alone or with a small funding from relatives, friends or associations. Even Martin Scorsese,for example, started autoproducendo short film The Big Shave,which brought him to the attention of some manufacturers to make his first feature film. 

David Lynch has a very long production of extraordinary shorts both at the beginning of his career and afterwards. For David Lynch, who is a director who loves to experiment from painting to TV series to video clips, short film is one of his favorite forms of expression. 

There history of cinema was born with short films. Thomas Edison He was one of the first to propose them with the individual vision model of the kinethoscope. Following the invention of the Cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, all films screened in public in collective mode were short films. They also lasted less than a minute. 

The duration limit of the film reels was in fact a few minutes. Making feature films was a complicated and expensive business, difficult to achieve with the post-production technologies of that era. 

Many of the short films shot by the operators that the Lumière brothers sent all over the world were short travel documentaries, formed from a single take, without any editing. 

Many production companies in the silent era produced only short films. The film show was in fact conceived as a package that included a main film and a short film, which was usually shown before the feature film. 

Famous Short Films

Charlie Chaplin started his career exclusively making The Famous Comic Shorts featuring the character of Charlot. The comic short was one of the most famous and popular shows of the silent era. Comedians Laurel and Hardy also made shorts almost exclusively until the late 1930s, when production shifted completely to feature films. 

Other popular shorts of the time were Joe McDoakes’ films and animated shorts from studios such as Walt Disney Productions and Warner Bros. Cartoons. By the mid-1950s the short film had completely disappeared, while the animated short films will continue to be famous and popular. 

Animated Short Films

In fact, short films were also the preferred format for television to broadcast animated films. Short films such as those of Hanna Barbera and the Pink Panther produced by large studios continued to be distributed on television for decades, with new episodes up to the 1980s and reruns during the 1990s. 

Today the most important production company that continues the tradition of short film is Pixar. In 2007 Pixar was acquired by Disney which continues to produce live-action shorts such as theseries Muppets and other shorts made for the YouTube channel. 

Short Films in Festivals

Short Films have often been relegated to the Festival circuit. Almost all the most prestigious and important festivals have a category reserved for short films, including the Academy Award. In recent years there has been an increasing importance of short films in the Festival circuit, thanks to digital channels that allow you to watch short films and films outside the traditional length formats. 

Indeed, since the 2000s, the supremacy of feature film as a standard format is losing importance. Many digital platforms have emerged that place great emphasis on distribution of short films. 

Discover Short Films on Indiecinema

Amateur Short Films

Another huge phenomenon is the production of amateur shorts, facilitated by new digital technologies and the mass use of smartphones that now produce videos of the highest quality. There is no doubt that there are some shorts made with a smartphone that are superior to professional shorts made by a studio with a big budget. 

It is a clear example of how the ideas, emotions, sensitivity and worldview of an amateur short film can sometimes be much more interesting than a professional film with famous actors. Packaging is not essential: with the development of technology that democratizes the art of cinema this is becoming more and more evident. 

The big studios, however, are now securing a monopoly through the distribution, marketing and public loyalty. There digital technology is in fact,not enough to convince the public to watch a short film or an independent film. 

Through complex strategies of homologation of preferences public. Piloting the mass audience remains a fairly simple operation when there is no widespread critical consciousness. 

Arthouse Short Films

There is no doubt that the author short film is one of the most made films by the great masters of cinema at the beginning of their career. From this point of view, one of the reasons is that the author’s short film allows you to experiment beyond the feature film, more expensive and difficult to make. 

The short film is the ideal territory for experimental and arthouse cinema, to build new avant-garde forms. In the world of auteur short films we find films with a strong visual component, devoid of a traditional narrative, sometimes devoid of dialogue. 

Even the format of the short film itself forces directors to invent new things, to seek the cinematic synthesis of events, often with a symbolic and metaphorical value. 

The list of the best short films to watch, absolutely

Here is a curated selection of films that perfectly embody the power and versatility of the short form: a journey through works that have broken conventions, touched the soul with animation, documented the unspeakable, and captured fragments of life with ruthless clarity. These are short films you absolutely must watch, masterpieces that prove that sometimes, the shortest stories are the ones that stay with us the longest.

Un Chien Andalou

Born from an encounter between two dreams—Luis Buñuel’s of an eye sliced by a razor and Salvador Dalí’s of ants swarming from a hand—Un Chien Andalou is a sixteen-minute assault on narrative logic. Devoid of a linear plot, the film proceeds through free association and shocking images, from a man dragging pianos laden with rotting donkeys to a hand pierced by emerging insects, defying any rational interpretation.

This short film is not just a movie; it’s a manifesto. The iconic and brutal opening sequence, in which an eye is slit, is a programmatic statement: to enter this new cinematic world, the viewer must abandon their conventional gaze, they must accept being wounded in their perception. Buñuel and Dalí, following the strict rule of rejecting any image that could have a rational or cultural explanation, use the short form to unleash the pure power of the unconscious, of the psychic automatism theorized by the Surrealists. It is an act of violent liberation that demonstrates how the short film can be not only a vehicle for stories, but a tool to radically alter consciousness.

Meshes of the Afternoon

A woman, played by director Maya Deren herself, returns home, dozes off in an armchair, and sinks into a labyrinthine dream. Within this dream, she obsessively relives the same sequence of events, but each time with increasingly sinister variations. Everyday objects—a key, a knife, a telephone—become charged with menace, while the protagonist duplicates, triplicates, pursued by a mysterious hooded figure with the face of a mirror.

If Un Chien Andalou was an external attack, a surrealist explosion directed against society, Meshes of the Afternoon represents a crucial evolution: the implosion of the avant-garde into interiority. Maya Deren, the godmother of American experimental cinema, uses the short film to map the psyche, transforming the domestic space into a theater of the unconscious. The film becomes a “poetic psychodrama,” where the circular narrative and repetition are not meant to shock, but to explore themes like identity, duality, and existential angst from a exquisitely feminine perspective. Deren domesticates surrealism, brings it within the walls of the home, and proves that the short form is the perfect tool for the deepest and most personal of introspections.

La Jetée

In a subterranean, post-apocalyptic Paris, a man is haunted by an image from his childhood: the face of a woman and the death of a man on the pier (“la jetée”) of Orly Airport. This memory, so powerful, makes him the ideal candidate for a time travel experiment. He is sent to the past, where he finds and falls in love with that woman, in a temporal loop destined to close tragically on that very same pier.

Chris Marker calls his work a “photo-roman,” a photo-novel. And indeed, La Jetée is composed almost entirely of still photographs, a montage of frozen moments accompanied by a narrator’s voice. This stylistic choice is not a whim, but the beating heart of the film. Marker deactivates the primary mechanism of cinema—the illusion of movement—to force us to reflect on the very nature of time and memory. Memory is not a continuous flow, but a collection of moments, of photographs imprinted on the mind. The film’s form is a perfect metaphor for its content. In this masterpiece of philosophical science fiction, the short film becomes the ideal laboratory for a radical experiment on cinematic language, proving that the most powerful emotion can arise not from what is shown, but from what is denied.

Luxo Jr.

In a dark room, a large desk lamp, Luxo Sr., watches his small and hyperactive offspring, Luxo Jr., play with a colorful ball. The little one’s enthusiasm is such that he accidentally deflates his toy. After a moment of despair, Luxo Jr. disappears and reappears triumphantly, pushing a much larger beach ball, under the resigned and affectionate gaze of his parent.

These two minutes changed the history of animation. Born as a technical demo to showcase the capabilities of the Pixar Image Computer, particularly its handling of self-shadowing, Luxo Jr. became Pixar’s foundational myth. John Lasseter, by applying the classic principles of Disney animation to inanimate geometric shapes, performed a miracle: he gave a soul to two lamps. The short film demonstrated that computer graphics were not just a cold, technical tool, but a new medium for telling stories and conveying emotions. It is the birth certificate of the Pixar philosophy: technology at the service of character and heart.

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What do they share, apart from 'B', Beckett, Buster Keaton, Bene and Bergman? They all lead a wide-eyed actress to perceive their own view. The way they shift from physical to metaphysical appearance.

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Vincent

Vincent Malloy is a seven-year-old boy, polite and kind. But in his mind, he is his idol, the actor Vincent Price. He locks himself in his room, transforming it into a gothic laboratory where he conducts experiments on his dog Abercrombie and mourns the loss of his beloved, buried alive, inspired by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. His macabre fantasy clashes with the mundane reality of a mother who simply wants him to go outside and play in the sun.

Made in stop-motion and in an expressionistic black and white while he was working as an animator at Disney, Vincent is the Rosetta Stone of Tim Burton’s entire filmography. In these six minutes, his whole universe is already present: the dreaming outcast, the fascination with the macabre, the contrast between a dark imagination and the colorful banality of the suburbs, the love for the gothic. The short form allowed Burton to create a pure distillate of his aesthetics and obsessions, a personal and intimate manifesto. To watch Vincent is to access the source code of an author who would define the imagination of entire generations.

Bao

A Chinese-Canadian mother, lonely and suffering from empty nest syndrome, is preparing baozi, the typical steamed buns. Suddenly, one of them comes to life. The woman raises it as a son, obsessively protecting it from the outside world. But the “dumpling-boy” grows up, becomes a rebellious teenager, and one day decides to leave home with his fiancée. In a desperate and shocking gesture, the mother grabs him and eats him.

Winner of the Academy Award, Bao marks a fundamental evolution in Pixar’s short films. If works like Luxo Jr. spoke a universal, almost wordless language, Domee Shi’s film is rooted in a profoundly specific cultural experience. The story, inspired by the director’s life, uses food and the family dynamics of the Chinese immigrant community in Canada to tell a universal metaphor about maternal love and the pain of letting go. The success of Bao proved that audiences were ready for more personal and diverse narratives, acting as a perfect “proof of concept” that paved the way for Shi to direct the feature film Turning Red.

World of Tomorrow

A little girl named Emily is contacted by her third-generation clone from 227 years in the future. The adult clone takes young Emily on a surreal journey through her memories, stored in a kind of future internet called the “Outernet.” As the clone recounts, in a melancholic and detached tone, a life of lost loves, jobs on the moon, and the search for immortality, little Emily responds with the naive and absurd ramblings typical of a four-year-old.

Don Hertzfeldt accomplishes a miraculous feat: he creates one of the most profound and moving works of science fiction of recent decades using minimalist, almost childlike animation with stick-figure characters. The genius of World of Tomorrow lies precisely in this contrast: the philosophical complexity of the clone’s monologue (which addresses themes of memory, mortality, technology, and the meaning of life) clashes with the disarming simplicity of the little girl’s reactions (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s real four-year-old niece). This short film proves that you don’t need colossal budgets and special effects to explore the great questions of existence. Sometimes, a stick figure is all it takes to get straight to the heart of the human condition.

Le Ballon Rouge

A young boy named Pascal finds a large red balloon tied to a lamppost in the gray and austere streets of post-war Paris. He frees the balloon, which turns out to have a will and consciousness of its own. They become inseparable friends: the balloon follows Pascal to school, on the bus, at home, like a faithful pet. Their magical friendship, however, attracts the envy of a group of bullies, who end up destroying the balloon with stones.

Winner of the Palme d’Or for best short film and, in a unique case in history, the Oscar for best original screenplay, Le Ballon Rouge is a work of pure visual poetry. Albert Lamorisse creates an almost silent film, where the narrative is entrusted entirely to the images. The chromatic contrast between the vibrant red of the balloon and the desaturated tones of the city creates a powerful visual metaphor for innocence, imagination, and childhood joy clashing with the prosaic and cruel adult world. The ending, in which all the balloons of Paris come to lift Pascal and carry him into the sky, is a moment of cinematic transcendence that consecrates the film as a timeless allegory on loss and hope.

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Nuit et Brouillard

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps, Alain Resnais’s camera moves slowly, with fluid, color tracking shots, through the silent, verdant ruins of Auschwitz and Majdanek. These images of the present (1955), peaceful and almost pastoral, are contrasted with sharp cuts to terrifying black-and-white archival footage of life and death in the camps. A calm, almost clinical narrator comments on the horror, asking questions about memory, responsibility, and oblivion.

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is not a documentary, but a philosophical essay, an “anti-documentary” that questions the very act of remembering. Resnais understands that the horror of the Holocaust is unrepresentable in its entirety and that any attempt at dramatization would risk trivializing it. The short film’s power lies precisely in its dialectical structure: the unbearable contrast between the tranquility of the present and the atrocity of the past. The color images of the empty camps are perhaps more frightening than the archival ones, because they show us how easily grass can grow over horror, how quickly memory can fade. The film is a powerful warning, a call to the viewer’s responsibility, forcing them to confront a terrible question: if it happened once, why couldn’t it happen again?

Wasp

Zoë is a young single mother with four small children and no money. Her life is a constant struggle for survival in a run-down English council estate. One day, she runs into an old friend, Dave, who asks her out. Desperate for a moment of normalcy and escape, Zoë accepts, but she doesn’t know who to leave the children with. She brings them along, telling Dave she’s just babysitting, and leaves them outside the pub with a bag of sugar for dinner, waiting for her to finish her date.

Winner of the Oscar, Wasp is a masterpiece of social realism, a punch to the gut that captures the desperation of poverty with an almost documentary-like clarity. Director Andrea Arnold, with her handheld camera glued to the characters, immerses us in Zoë’s life without filters and without judgment. The short form is perfect for this kind of “slice of life” narrative: there’s no need for a complex story arc or a resolution. The film’s 24 minutes are enough to convey the anguish, the hunger (both literal and metaphorical), and the impossible choices of a woman trapped in a cycle from which there seems to be no escape. It is a human, empathetic, and devastating portrait.

Six Shooter

A man named Donnelly, his face a mask of restrained grief, has just lost his wife. During the sad train journey home, he finds himself sharing a compartment with a young couple devastated by the death of their newborn son and with a talkative, foul-mouthed, and clearly psychotic young man. The ensuing conversation is a surreal and macabre ballet of pain, sudden violence, and pitch-black humor, culminating in a shootout and an ending as tragic as it is absurd.

With his directorial debut, playwright Martin McDonagh creates a work that is a perfect distillation of his entire creative universe. Six Shooter is a black comedy that constantly walks a tightrope, mixing the deepest tragedy with bizarre dialogue and grotesque situations (like the story of a cow that exploded from intestinal gas). The short film functions as a laboratory in which McDonagh experiments with and perfects the tonal acrobatics that would become his trademark in films like In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It is a demonstration of how the short form can be used to forge a unique and unmistakable authorial voice.

The Neighbors’ Window

Alli, a middle-aged mother overwhelmed by family routine, finds an unexpected escape by watching her new neighbors from her window: a beautiful, free, and vibrant couple in their twenties. Her initial curiosity soon turns into a voyeuristic obsession, a mix of envy and nostalgia for her lost youth. Day after day, she spies on their passion, their parties, their apparent perfection. But one day, the spectacle changes, and Alli becomes a witness to a tragedy that will completely overturn her perspective.

Inspired by a true story and winner of the Oscar, The Neighbors‘ Window is a masterful example of how a short film can orchestrate a powerful emotional reversal. For much of its 20 minutes, the film skillfully builds a universal and relatable feeling: the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. We identify with Alli’s envy. Then, in the finale, the revelation of the young neighbor’s illness shatters this perception, transforming envy into empathy and, finally, into gratitude for her own life, with all its imperfections. The film’s strength lies precisely in this narrative economy: the ability to build and then deconstruct a single, powerful emotional premise with an efficiency that a feature film could hardly match.