GoCritic! Fest Anča 2024
The next GoCritic! workshop organised in partnership with the Animation Festival Network takes place at Fest Anča International Animation Festival and its Student Forum in Žilina, Slovakia, from 25 to 30 July, 2024. Six promising international film journalists and critics work with tutor Vladan Petković on reviews, interviews, industry stories and essays focused on the animation scene. All articles are published on Cineuropa and Zippy Frames.
GoCritic! Participants at Fest Anča International Animation Festival 2024
Kanako Fujita
A London-based Japanese film producer and writer with a passion for the cinematic exchange between Asian and European film, Kanako Fujita holds a BA in Film Studies from King’s College. She has worked in production and distribution, and her feature-length and short films have won awards at various international film festivals and been released theatrically in Japan.
Federica Giampaolo
Federica Giampaolo is an Italian film critic, writer and translator. An alumna of the 2023 Far East Film Festival Campus, she has an academic background in Asian studies and works as a bilingual correspondent at European and Asian cinema festivals for magazines all over the world. She is a dedicated festival news editor for Italian outlets and a culture writer for various international outlets. She is also an aspiring panellist, holding monthly online discussions on film-related topics for the social media-based outlet Tofu Narrazioni. In addition to cinema, she publishes on media criticism and cultural phenomena with a keen eye on queerness, gender and society. When not writing, she focuses on editorial and audiovisual translation.
Sergiu Inizian
Sergiu Inizian is a journalist based in Bucharest, Romania. In addition to writing a series of cinema essays for the international art organisation Arcadia, he has co-written two short films. He has previously covered editions of Transilvania International Film Festival and Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, two of Romania's most popular festivals. He participated in the 2023 FIPRESCI Warsaw Critics Project and frequently collaborates with Eye for Film, a UK-based publication which saw him covering the 2024 Berlinale.
Botagoz Koilybayeva
Botagoz Koilybayeva is a Kazakh-born, Prague-based PhD candidate, researcher and film writer. She writes about cinema in English-language and Central Asian contexts, both inside and outside academia. Her English writing can be found on Little White Lies and her Instagram blog @weloveindependent. Her bylines in Russian include Art of Her, ’98mag and Qyzqaras. Recently she teamed up with the female-led Kazakh film initiative Qyzqaras (meaning “female gaze” in Kazakh) to bring world cinema classics to Kazakh-speaking audiences. Having completed an MA thesis focused on film, she is currently pursuing a PhD on the intersection of film, ecology and the nonhuman with the dissertation title “On Animal Subjectivity in Film: Multispecies Documentaries and the Cinematic Umwelt”. So far she has presented her research at conferences in Dresden and Utrecht.
Kalash Nanda Kumar
Kalash Nanda Kumar is a critic and journalist from Malaysia. He graduated with a degree in filmmaking and has worked on several major productions. He is an alumnus of the Climate Tracker fellowship, Far East Film Festival Critics Campus, the Golden Apricot IFF Critics workshop and Yamagata IDFF. In 2022, he became the first Malaysian member of FIPRESCI and was recently selected as an international voter for the Golden Globe Awards. He has also participated in various regional and international film festivals as a juror, programmer and facilitator. As a journalist, he has covered a wide range of socio-economic issues with bylines in national outlets such as R.AGE, The Vibes, Malaysiakini and FirstClasse, among others. He is currently the programme director of Raintown Film Festival in Malaysia.
Taras Tarnalitsky
Taras Tarnalitsky is a Belarusian journalist and film professional in exile (now living in Poland), creator of the Telegram channel about national cinema "Holybelawood" and co-founder of the Belarusian film critics’ award Red Heather. He has been working in media for 15 years and has published in more than 30 media outlets in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. He is a member of the Belarusian Association of Journalists and the Belarusian union of cinematographers. Previously he served as a member of the jury of Open Air Film Fest, Unfiltered Cinema and Velcom Smartfilm, in addition to acting as an invited film critic, media expert and art manager on various film initiatives.
