Young Critics Workshop 2015

I am a communications graduate and law student who has just moved to Brussels after spending a quarter of a century in the ever quiet Louvain. Cinema has always been important to me, because I am fascinated by the power of images and the ability to project ideas. I appreciate filmmakers – and people in general – who dare to be radical. Things that are chaotic, erratic or incoherent usually don’t bother me. My admiration for auteur cinema is balanced by an addiction to trash, pulp and Hollywood genre movies. I consider myself to be an eclectic person, but maybe I just have bad taste.

I am a New Delhi-based film critic and festival programmer. In the last five years of my work in the field, I have actively collaborated with leading filmmakers, critics, film society professionals, cultural institutions and students to institute an atmosphere of meaningful and rewarding engagement with cinema in the city. My work has been cited/published in prestigious national and international forums such as mubi.com, Film Studies for Free, Bright Lights Film Journal, Cinema Without Borders, Transit Cine, The Seventh Art and Shadowplay.

Greetings, my name is Maximilien Luc Proctor. I am half-French, half-American, and spend most of my time in Germany. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Studies from the University of Oklahoma (my home state) and since graduation I have spread my efforts across filmmaking, film criticism, music, and prose fiction. In February I attended the Berlinale as a critic and it was remarkable. I applied for this program in an effort to keep attending festivals that excite me as much as that did, and to hone my writing into a professional and legitimate career path.

Irina Trocan is a Romanian film critic and short film programmer for the NexT Film Festival in Bucharest, as well as the coordinator of the online media & culture magazine Acoperişul de Sticlă. She has written in Romanian and English for several publications: Film Menu, Film Reporter, Close Up, Festivalists, Movie Mezzanine, Fandor. Her essay on fragmented narration in the films of Adrian Sitaru was published in the 2015 critical anthology Film Policies: Contributions to interpreting contemporary Romanian cinema. Since 2015, she is working a PhD study of video essays to argue that they are the missing link between film criticism and filmmaking.

As a recent graduate in journalism and theatre and film studies, I am fascinated by the exercise of trying to translate feelings caused by images on a screen to words on a page. In the past year I have found myself especially intrigued by films with unconventional or challenging narrative structures (for my thesis I took a closer look at the unreliable narrator). Proud idealism and incurable escapism would be accurate descriptors of both my writing and personality.