Jessica McGoff is a Scottish writer and video essayist. She has been published in MUBI Notebook, CinemaScope, and Another Gaze. Her video essays have been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Glasgow Short Film Festival, and the Museum of Moving Image, New York.
Jessica McGoff
Jessica McGoff 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 Jessica McGoff’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Portrait of Ga | Margaret Tait | United Kingdom | 1952 | 4’ | ||
| Meshes of the Afternoon | Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren | USA | 1946 | 14’ | ||
| Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death | Arthur Jafa | USA | 2017 | 8’ | ||
| Saute ma ville Blow Up My Town | Chantal Akerman | Belgium | 1968 | 13’ | ||
| Possibly in Michigan | Cecelia Condit | USA | 1983 | 12’ | ||
| backflip | Nikita Diakur | Germany | 2022 | 7’ | ||
| Window Water Baby Moving | Stan Brakhage | USA | 1959 | 13’ | ||
| 3 Logical Exits | Mahdi Fleifel | Denmark, Lebanon, United Kingdom | 2020 | 15’ | ||
| Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore | Mark Leckey | United Kingdom | 1999 | 15’ | ||
| The Black Tower | John Smith | United Kingdom | 1987 | 24’ | ||