Film Society of Lincoln Center Announces Locarno Film Festival's Critics Academy Finalists

The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Indiewire, in partnership with Film Comment magazine, announced the finalists for the third annual Locarno Film Festival's Critics Academy (August 10-16), a workshop for aspiring film critics that takes place during the festival. The program, which has a stateside component at the New York Film Festival, is designed to nurture promising film critics and journalists as they attend and cover screenings and events at the festival.

More than 120 applications submitted by aspiring writers and journalists from around the world, six finalists were selected by editors at Indiewire and Film Comment, which this edition is taking on a bigger role in the workshop by assigning participants to produce work for the magazine's website during the festival.

The Critics Academy will work under the editorial guidance of Indiewire Senior Editor Eric Kohn and Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The participants will cover the festival with reviews of films in the selection, articles on sidebar events, in-depth reflections on the various program sections, or interviews with the festival's guests. Starting this year, the Critics Academy will also involve an additional four Swiss participants, thanks to collaboration with the Federal Office of Culture (FOC), the Association of Swiss Film Journalists and the website Cineman. Those participants were selected by the Swiss Alliance of Film Journalists, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and the website Cineman.ch, which will work with these finalists on work published in their native languages.

One of the oldest film festivals in the world, Locarno is also one of the more diverse, with a program that blends first-time filmmakers, festival favorites, and cinephile treats with mainstream crowd-pleasers that screen outdoors in its Piazza Grande section. Over the course of the Critics Academy (which is part of the Locarno Summer Academy), participants will have the opportunity to cover all of these areas, producing both traditional criticism and reported work for Indiewire, its Criticwire blog, and the festival's Pardo Live publication, alongside their Film Comment contributions. To supplement these efforts, the workshop will feature candid roundtable discussions with working critics and other members of the industry to put their work in context.

Finalists for the 2014 Locarno Critics Academy:

Mallory Andrew
Neil Bahadur
Michael Guarnieri
Leonie Krähenbühl
Tina Poglajen
Walter Rohrbach
Julian Ross
Andrei Sendrea
Pascaline Sordet
Martina Viviani

The Locarno Critics Academy is supported by Gohner Stiftung and organized in collaboration with the Festival del film Locarno, Indiewire, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, Film Comment, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FOC), the Swiss Association of Film Journalists (SVFJ), the Centre for Publishing in the Arts of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and Cineman.ch.

The 2014 edition of the Locarno Film Festival runs August 6-16.

FILM SOCIETY OF Lincoln CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, The Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award. The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

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