Mostly white, and still mostly male, film critics are part of a highly concentrated power structure when it comes to trade reviews and market success. If transparency and diversity at film festivals is not enough to open up the door of the industry, is it time we asked ourselves: ‘are film critics even needed?
Presented by Documentary Campus
Speakers
- Uzma Hasan, producer, Little House Productions, UK
- Dina Iordanova, Professor of Global Cinema, DinaView, UK/Bulgaria
- Heleen Gerritsen, Head of Festival, goEast - Festival of Central and Eastern European Film, Germany
- Pedro Tinen, Film Critic, Brazil
- Aashna Thakkar, Film Festival Programmer and Interdisciplinary Artist, Regent Park Film Festival, Canada
Moderated by
- Paula Alvarez Vaccaro, Producer, Pinball London, UK
Uzma Hasan
Uzma Hasan is a film and TV producer and the driving force behind Little House Productions which focuses on bringing subversive stories to global audiences. She is currently producing an adaptation of Akram Khan’s CREATURE for the English National Ballet directed by Academy Award winner Asif Kapadia (AMY). Her slate includes an original musical with Ritesh Batra (THE LUNCHBOX) and Amazon Studios, a period sports drama with novelist Nikesh Shukla (THE GOOD IMMIGRANT) and the BFI, and a contemporary reworking of Macbeth set between London and Karachi with playwright Rabiah Hussain (SPUN). She is next shooting Gautam Malkani’s cult novel LONDONSTANI for the BFI in Spring 2022. Previous credits include Nirpal Bhogal’s FIRSTBORN, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2016 ahead of a worldwide sale to Netflix, and THE INFIDEL which spawned a musical and Bollywood remake DHARAM SANKAT MEIN. In addition to Little House Productions, Uzma is a non executive director on the board of public broadcaster Channel 4, Chair of the Bush Theatre and a trustee of Bird’s Eye View, a non profit that campaigns for gender equality in film. She sits on selection committees and juries for the British Independent Film Awards, Film London and BAFTA. Uzma worked across four continents, for independents and studios, with companies including Focus Features, Doha Film Institute, and Tribeca Film Festival on the development, production and exploitation of feature films. She graduated from University of Wales, Cardiff with first class honours in English Literature and went on to read Film and Literature at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences where she was a Kennedy Scholar.
Dina Iordanova
Based in Scotland, Dina Iordanova is a film historian and writer whose work on matters of film festivals, global film culture and transnational film industries has been widely published. She is also known for her expertise in Balkan and Eastern European cinema. Her writing is available at dinaview.org
Heleen Gerritsen
Heleen Gerritsen was born in the Netherlands in 1978 and studied Slavonic languages and economics in Amsterdam and St. Petersburg. In 2003, she moved to Germany, where she completed a course in film production and started freelancing as a producer, mostly with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. From 2014 to 2016, she was Festival Director At the European Documentary Film Festival dokumentART in Neubrandenburg. Since 2017, Gerritsen has been at the helm of goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film, which is organised by the German Film Institute in Wiesbaden.
Pedro Tinen
Pedro Tinen is a Japanese-Brazilian film programmer, curator, critic and researcher, a German Chancellor Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a member of the Programmers of Colour Collective (POC2) and of the selection committees of the MixBrasil LGBT Film Festival and the Ecofalante Environmental Film Festival. Formerly, he was the Brazilian Programming Coordinator at the São Paulo Short Film Festival (2019–2020). He is an alumnus of the Locarno Industry Academy International programme and of the MRG//WORK residency of the Doclisboa and Márgenes festivals. He holds a Master’s degree in media studies from the University of Campinas in Brazil.
Aashna Thakkar
Aashna Thakkar (she/her) is an Indo-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, film festival programmer and writer based in Toronto. She is currently Manager of Programming at the Regent Park Film Festival and previously held positions at the Breakthroughs Film Festival and the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Through her work, she aims to amplify stories of BIPOC and other marginalised identities, while continuously exploring the intersections of South Asian identity, gender and body politics.
Paula Alvarez Vaccaro
An award-winning producer and scriptwriter, Paula Alvarez Vaccaro began her career as a journalist in Argentina and has over twenty-five years’ experience working in film, television, radio and print media on three continents. Pinball London, the company she founded in London in 2009, has worked with directors from more than fifteen countries and has won more than thirty awards at A-list festivals worldwide. She is a member of BAFTA, the Writers Guild of Great Britain, the European Film Academy and the European Women’s Audiovisual Network. She is currently on her third mandate as Vice-President of the European Producers Club and is one of the founders of the Anti-Racism Taskforce for European Film.