‎Vimeo Staff Picks 2025 • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

While the end of the calendar year comes with countless lists crunching the numbers on the best films of the year, these are too often reserved for features exclusively. It’s an enormous achievement, no doubt, but where would these filmmakers and film lovers be without the short films that laid the foundations of the craft?

This is where Vimeo Staff Picks comes in: since 2008, their black and white badge has been a symbol of prestige and helped launch the careers of celebrated directors around the world. Nearly two decades on, the humans behind Vimeo’s curation team celebrated 300+ short films in the Staff Picks channel this year, and as is tradition, hand-picked their top ten Best Videos of 2025 to spotlight a crop that no year-end list would be complete without.

From an animated love letter to arrested development, to a Brussels-based portrait of a young gay squatter, to revealing historical portraits and one major music video-adjacent moment, here’s what the community has to say about these ten shorts. Happy watchlisting!