Delphine Jeanneret

Delphine Jeanneret is a film curator and lecturer at Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), where she gives a course on the power of representation in contemporary cinema with a focus on gender, decolonial, and ecological studies. She is part of the Locarno Film Festival (Open Doors) and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur artistic committee. She founded the Festival Cinéma Jeune Public in Lausanne to engage with young audiences and is the chair of the association Ciné-Doc, promoting documentary forms in Switzerland. She has been programming films in festivals, art spaces, and film institutions for more than 18 years and is strongly involved in programmes that aim at revealing young filmmakers with new aesthetics. She is a member of the Swiss Film Academy and the European Film Academy.

Delphine Jeanneret participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Delphine Jeanneret’s submission:

Thinking of only 10 short films is a tough exercise and I wish I could have included a much longer list of films. I hope the other participants will have included them so that collectively we end up with a list that maps films around the world and gives a voice to the many filmmakers who took part in reinventing new imaginaries throughout times.

— Delphine Jeanneret

Movie	Original Title	Director	Country	Year
The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast	Forugh Farrokzhad	Iran	1963	22’
Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes “ugliness”, of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.
At Land	Maya Deren	USA	1944	15’
At Land has a dream-like narrative in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself. Deren once said that the film is about the struggle to maintain ones personal identity. The composer John Cage and the poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in making the film, and appear in the film, which was shot at Amagansett, Long Island.
Atlantiques	Mati Diop	France, Senegal	2009	16’
Fifteen years before she won the Golden Bear for Dahomey, Mati Diop began her career with an atmospheric tale of treacherous voyages and lives risked to the ocean. Flickering with the mercurial hopes of Senegalese youth, Atlantics later inspired her ghostly, acclaimed feature of the same name.
Black Panthers	Agnès Varda	France	1968	28’
A film shot during the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California around the meetings organised by the Black Panthers Party to free Huey Newton, one of their leaders, and to turn his trial into a political debate. They tried and succeeded in catching America’s attention.
Madame's cravings Madame a des envies	Alice Guy-Blaché	France	1906	5’
A pregnant woman takes a stroll with her husband. Along the walk, the future mother satisfies her cravings by stealing food, alcohol and even a pipe. This makes her husband go mad.
La petite vendeuse de soleil The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun	Djibril Diop Mambéty	France, Senegal, Switzerland	1999	45’
A young, illiterate, disabled girl named Sili from a shantytown on the outskirts of Dakar decides one day to abandon her blind grandmother’s vocation of begging in the street and take up the physically demanding job of selling newspapers.
As Long As Shotguns Remain Tant qu'il nous reste des fusils à pompe	Caroline Poggi , Jonathan Vinel	France	2014	30’
In search of purpose and connection, the despondent siblings in this atmospheric short ramble through sleepy suburbs that are filmed like the background of a video game. Cool in style and melancholy in subject, this film is also miraculously warm, imbued with a young man’s love for his brother.
Les Femmes palestiniennes Les Femmes palestiniennes	Jocelyne Saab	Palestine	1974	11’
Palestinian women, the often-forgotten victims of the Israeli-Palestinian war, are here given a voice by Jocelyne Saab.
Genealogy of Violence Généalogie de la violence	Mohamed Bourouissa	France	2024	15’
Imagine a film about police brutality, with no brutality. A film where nothing happens, yet you’re left baffled. Invisible violence, disguised under lawful humiliation. Domination wrapped in polite protocols. I started talking about making this short film back in 2018, but the idea of it was haunting me probably since the late 90s, when I started being constantly stopped by the police for “random identity checks”. I felt a certain urgency to tell this very personal story.
Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3	Korakrit Arunanondchai	Thailand	2015	24’
Like the paint splattered on the denim jacket he adorns, Bangkok-born artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s film explodes with energy. Situated somewhere between a hip-hop music video and an evangelist ad, the film contemplates the possibility of divinity in the age of advanced technology and globalisation. As spirits are replaced with drones, Arunanondchai converses with his muse and fictional painter Chantri as he reaches out for spiritual enlightenment through collective expression.