Young Film Critics gathered for “A Sunday in the Country”
The Danish Film Critic, editor and reviewer, Samina Jakobsen, from the film magazine Ekko, participated in this year’s “A Sunday in Country” workshop for young film critics, during the Polish T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival
The participants, recommended by their country’s respective national culture institutions, meet for 3 days in a remote country house near Wrocław, where they watch and discuss films, meet special guests (filmmakers brought by New Horizons IFF) and talk about film criticism issues. The purpose of the workshop is to exchange professional experiences in order to build an international professional network.
Participants in this year’s “A Sunday in the Country” talked about issues such as: What’s the responsibility (if there is one) of a critic towards (national) film productions? And towards the reader? What is the reality for film critics in different countries?
The participants also met with the festival’s jury members Hadas Ben Aroya and Gastón Solnicki, as well as the director of The Ornithologist João Pedro Rodrigues and the author of 78/52 documentary, Alexandre O. Philippe.
The meetings took place under the guidance of Magdalena Miedl, the established critic from the Austrian “Celluloid” and coordinators from the New Horizons Association and European Film Academy.
2017 Participants
11 participants from 9 countries took part in the workshops: Franziska Bechtold (Austria), Samina Jakobsen (Denmark), Hugo Emmerzael (the Netherlands), Shani Kiniso (Israel), Karl-Leontin Beger (Germany), Piotr Czerkawski, Sebastian Smoliński and Patrycja Mucha (Poland), Tiago Silva (Portugal), Andra Petrescu (Romania) and Edoardo Becattini (Italy).
Samina Jakobsen – film critic, reviewer, editor, has worked for the Danish Filmmagazine Ekko since 2013. Samina has finished Film Studies (master) and Film- and Media Studies (bachelor) at University of Copenhagen.
Danish Cultural Institute in Poland supports A Sunday in the Country.
T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival – the most visited film festival in Poland, one of the most popular in this part of Europe (with over 100,000 spectators each year), an important meeting place for international filmmakers. The festival was launched in 2001, aiming at presenting independent artistic cinema. One of the key components of its mission is to present the achievements of the cinema masters and discover the works of those artists, who are less known, yet their work is of a tremendous importance for the creators of the festival.
I attended Sunday in the Country in 2016 and found it a highly rewarding experience. For four days, I lived with 11 other young European film critics and journalists in a beautiful lake house outside Wroclaw, spending day and night discussing cinema, film criticism and life. We also watched films from the New Horizons festival programme and had engaging discussions about them with their directors who joined us for lunch and dinner. (…)
It was fascinating to share ideas and compare and contrast approaches to film criticism with my new friends from Poland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Rumania, Spain, Austria, Hungary and Czech Republic whom I hope will remain in my network for many years to come. I got so many new perspectives on both film criticism and European identity.
Comment on t-mobile new horizons page by last year’s Danish participant Freelance Journalist Freja Dam.