Ihave been seeking a quiet time in the calendar to share this rather extraordinary effort with you, and in this lull before award season ends, I think I’ve found it. People love lists, and in the hope of clicks, we’re inundated on the internet with top tens, retrospective rankings, and challenges to established history across every sphere of culture. Feature films, of course, have this, whether you go populist with the big IMDB or Letterboxd rankings, or favor critic lists compiled by the likes of Sight and Sound. But shorts? For sure, lists exist, but I’ve never seen a truly authoritative effort at establishing an essential corpus—until now. Niels Putman is a key figure in the short film critical community. He is the artistic director of yanco, the short film magazine formerly known as kortfilm.be, and the co-founder of Talking Shorts. Teaming up with Maike Mia Höhne, the former head of Berlinale Shorts and current Artistic Director of Kurtzfilm Hamburg, they polled 270 film professionals asking them to nominate “ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the ‘greatest’ of all time.” Compiling those ballots, earlier this month, they published a debut 105-film ranked list entitled “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025. visit the websiteI wish they didn’t use the quotation marks, as I imagine it’s a form of protective modesty ill-befitting such an inherently arrogant endeavor. And no, I don’t think the list is perfect by any means, but no list is! Especially not the first effort in a process that will be revisited in five years.My personal critiques: the list is heavily academic and dominated by experimental work. This anti-populism comes through most clearly in animation—no Disney shorts, or Looney Tunes, or anime, for example. This extends to other popular periods and styles—while Buster Keaton is represented twice, none of the other US-based silent film greats are. 20 of the 105 are from the 21st century, which feels light, and with this being the period we know best, I am comfortable proclaiming the selections to be pretty arbitrary. Coming from Europe, the list tilts towards that continent (I don’t think I spotted a Chinese film?!), and when it ventures into Asia or Africa, it tends privilege minor efforts from name-brand directors or early shorts from filmmakers that made good, rather than meaningfully engage with questions of popularity, legacy, or impact. However, these personal critiques are not a refutation of the list; they are, indeed, the whole point! As an introductory effort, there is not a lot of consensus yet, with just four votes needed to make the list. As this process continues, we can argue the selections; factions will coalesce in favor of certain shorts, or against. Things will fall off, the weaknesses of the list will be consciously addressed, and, even as the list becomes more diverse, a degree of bunching will begin as a canon forms. That process kicked off at Berlinale last month as Putman and Höhne presented the project in a talk. It’s exciting work, and something I’m particularly eager to dive into. I’ve never considered myself an academic of the short form, so a lot of these films are, frankly, new to me. I encourage you to browse the list’s official home on yanco, but there are no viewing links there. We have created a collection for the list on Shortverse with viewing options when available. We’ve tried to be cognizant of copyright when sourcing links from the internet, but if you’re a rights-holder whose work is linked here, message us.Click to browse the Shortverse Collection dedicated to the list, with viewing links for many of the films