Notebook is the official publication partner of the 2024 Locarno Critics Academy. This ten-day summer workshop immerses emerging critics in the craft of covering film festivals. Today, we’re excited to announce the ten selected participants.
“In 2024, the task of selecting ten writers for the Critics Academy was more herculean than ever before,” said the Academy’s co-organizers, Christopher Small, responsible for the texts and publications of the Locarno Film Festival, and Chloe Lizotte, Deputy Editor of Notebook. “No doubt thanks to a new editorial partnership with Notebook, we received more than twice as many applications than in any other year. Our selection will bring a diverse group of writers to the festival in August, traveling to Locarno from all around the globe: Argentina, China, the Dominican Republic, France, Mexico, Romania, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States.
“These critics have varied interests and styles, writing diaristically, historically, academically, commercially—but always, crucially, with imaginative flair and critical rigor. Many are also involved in the production of their own publications as editors, an act that ensures a future for film criticism, however modest and against whatever odds. We’re excited to write and think with them over the course of the festival, and to share their coverage with Notebook’s readers.”
(Top row, from left) Katarina Docalovich (USA), Sasha Han (Singapore), Pierre Jendrysiak (France), Fareyah Kaukab (Switzerland), Leonard Krähmer (Germany); (Bottom row, from left) Victor Morozov (Romania), Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer (Mexico/USA), Cici Peng (China/Uganda), Lucía Requejo (Argentina), Julia Scrive-Loyer (Dominican Republic).
The participants for this year’s Locarno Critics Academy are:
Katarina Docalovich is a freelance film writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her B.A. in Cinema and English from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019. You can read her work in Paste Magazine and Merry-Go-Round Magazine, among others. She is currently the editorial and programming intern at Le Cinéma Club. Her primary interest is in women-led independent films.
Sasha Han seeks to reify the fugitive effects of looking through language. Broadly, her interests lie in examining the circulation of images in Southeast Asia. An alumni of critics labs at the Far East Film Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), she worked with SGIFF as part of the editorial team for its annual Atlas magazine and as an external reviewer. Her writing has been published by Asian Film Archive, In Review Online, MARG1N magazine, and the Singapore Film Society.
Pierre Jendrysiak is a film critic, writer, teacher, and programmer working in France. He is one of the lead writers and editors of the French online film magazine Débordements, as well as a frequent contributor to the online publication AOC media (Analyse, Opinion, Critique). His writing deals with contemporary cinema, cinephilia, and the somewhat complicated relationship between aesthetics and politics.
Fareyah Kaukab, born in Mirpur Khas, Pakistan, experienced extensive travel during her early years, residing on three continents before the age of seven. Her family eventually settled in Switzerland. A multi-hyphenate professional with a background in architecture, she practiced that career for a decade before branching out into illustration, writing, journalism, film criticism, and podcasting. She is fluent in five languages, and her diverse upbringing and multifaceted career have deeply influenced her storytelling.
Leonard Krähmer is a freelance film critic based in Berlin with a growing fondness for festival coverage. His writing and criticism have appeared in various print and online magazines, including cargo, critic.de, and Jugend ohne Film. He is studying cultural history and theory as well as German literature at Humboldt University of Berlin, where he is currently completing his bachelor’s thesis on the cinema of Ramon and Silvan Zürcher in relation to Lacanian film theory.
Victor Morozov grew up in Romania and studied in Grenoble and Paris. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin on the televised archives of the Romanian Revolution. He is a staff writer for Scena9 and Dilema veche, and a regular collaborator for Films in Frame. He has published in Cahiers du cinéma, Revue Débordements, and Club de Mediapart, among others. He has participated in several workshops dedicated to young film critics: Talents Sarajevo, Rotterdam Film Festival Young Critics, Viennale Young Critics' Circle, and Porto/Post/Doc Critics Lab.
Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is a Mexican-American film critic, editor, and film programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently the managing editor at Screen Slate and a contributing editor at Le Cinéma Club. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Notebook. In 2022, he was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Undergraduate Award, and he has also participated in Reverse Shot’s Emerging Critics Workshop in both 2023 and 2024.
Cici Peng is a Ugandan-Chinese writer and programmer in London. Her practice is engaged with experimental moving image, East and South East Asian cinema, animism, and the archive. She is a programmer for Sine Screen, a collective exhibiting work by East and South East Asian artists. She has programmed screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Barbican and for Queer East Film Festival. She has written for TANK, Dazed, the Financial Times, and Little White Lies. She is a screener for the 62nd New York Film Festival’s Currents section.
Lucía Requejo is a writer, teacher, and editor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She works for a newspaper, as she wanted to when she was a little girl. Her film and visual-studies criticism has been published in Revista Encuadra, Revista Oropel, and La rabia. She’s also a frequent contributor to Con los ojos abiertos. Lately, she’s been interested in movies that either shed light on or cast darkness over the tense relationship between women and images. She programs occasionally for the thrill of seeing others affected by “the” other.
Julia Scrive-Loyer has always moved between two places: Europe, where she was born, and the Caribbean, where she is from. Literature shaped her, and cinema gave her a home. Her ambition has always been to combine these two forms of art. She was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1993. Her father is a French linguist and her mother is a Dominican filmmaker. She studied French philology at the University of Alicante from 2011 until 2015; later, she attended the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba for a program in scriptwriting, from which she graduated in 2018. Besides her studies, Julia also works as a freelance translator and has worked on numerous screenplays, both in French and English, and as a script doctor for short and feature films, both fiction and documentary. In 2012, she created a monographic and interdisciplinary zine called Les Oranges Bleues. In 2018, she created Simulacro, an online film magazine.