The second season of our partnership with the Animation Festival Network starts with another workshop at the Animest International Animation Film Festival in Bucharest, from 9 to 15 October, 2023. Five promising international film journalists and critics will work with tutor Vladan Petković on reviews, interviews, industry stories and essays focused on the animation scene.

GoCritic! Participants at Animest 2023

Claudia Alexandru

Claudia Alexandru is a Romanian cineaste whose formative years in establishing a personal connection to cinema developed when she was introduced to film education. During this time, she earned her BA in Filmology and MA in Performing Arts and Film at the Faculty of Theatre and Film in Cluj-Napoca, as well as a 5-month Erasmus study mobility programme completed at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Building upon this strong foundation, she has since been looking to deepen the understanding of her role in relation to the vastness of the cinematic ecosystem. She contributed to the early development stages of the short film Puiet/Sapling during five weeks of collaboration with inspiring tutors and peers as part of Aristoteles Workshop. Through writing and group discourse, she engaged with a diverse and intriguing selection of perspectives on a common theme as a preselection committee member for the Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival. These are just a few instances that further fuelled her curiosity around the art form closest to her heart, where curiosity was proven and intuited as essential during her academic years.

Amarsanaa Battulga

Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic, programmer, and PhD student at Nanjing University, China. He’s an alumnus of the 2023 Berlinale Talent Press and the 2022 Far East Film Festival Campus, and worked as the associate editor of ChinaNauts, an online magazine on contemporary China. He has served on the selection committees for the 2023 Cambridge Film Festival and the 2024 True/False Fest. His bylines include Die Welt, photogénie, Talking Shorts, and more.

Carlota Ezquiaga

Journalist, social media manager and scriptwriter from San Sebastian, Spain. After working in media and communication, as well as the Industry Department of the San Sebastian Film Festival, she currently works for a Basque TV production company and writes about film in Milana, a Spanish online magazine where she is also an editor in chief.

Yulia Neproshina

Yulia Neproshina is an Italian filmmaker and film critic, originally from Moscow. She is currently the editor for the online Italian cinema magazine Arte Settima. Her passion for writing led her to get a bachelor's degree in Communications at the University of Turin. In 2019, during her Erasmus in Grenoble, she took a documentary workshop, thanks to which she decided to later pursue Cinema Studies for her master’s degree, with Gender Studies as main area of interest. In 2022, she went on an Erasmus placement to Paris where she took part in several fiction and documentary workshops that allowed her to broaden her filmmaking horizons. Last summer she joined the CinemadaMare film campus, where she wrote, directed and edited her first short films.

Olivia Popp

Based in Berlin, Olivia Popp is a Taiwanese American film writer and graduate student exploring transnationalism, critical theory, and queer imagination. She is a master’s student of Global Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University (California, USA). Most recently, Olivia was a member of the young critics' campus at the 25th Far East Film Festival (Udine, Italy). Later this year, she will be on the International People’s Jury for the 17th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival (Warsaw, Poland) and part of the young critics’ workshop at the 20th Verzió Film Festival (Budapest, Hungary). Olivia has written for Asian Movie Pulse, Vague Visages, Mise-en-Scène: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration, Catapult Magazine, Unwinnable, and others.