Six new participants will take part in the festival and will also get the chance to join its Student Forum between 28 June and 3 July; the deadline for applications is 12 May

The last event on GoCritic!’s busy summer agenda is the Fest Anča International Animation Festival in Žilina, Slovakia. The festival itself will take place from 29 June-2 July, but it is preceded by the Student Forum Fest Anča (27-30 June).

Fest Anča is the only Slovak multimedia festival focused on animated film and mainly aimed at mature audiences, with a competitive line-up comprising a selection of stand-out animated films completed in the last two years. Through non-competitive thematic sections and regional focuses, Fest Anča presents artistic and production milestones in the history of animation. The festival includes an international competition of animated short films, music videos, and non-competitive screening sections. Additional accompanying events include presentations, exhibitions, workshops, concerts, and film screenings for children. The festival’s industry forum is targeted at film professionals with a focus on the planning, development and presentation of animated film projects.

The GoCritic! workshop at Fest Anča will be tutored by Neil Young (Easington, UK, 1971), a film critic, curator and occasional filmmaker from Sunderland, England, now living in Vienna. He regularly reviews new films for Screen International and contributes to several international outlets, including Sight & Sound magazine. He also works for a variety of film festivals around Europe, including the Viennale, Vienna Shorts and Kortfilmfestivalen (Grimstad, Norway). He has served on many international film-festival juries and was president of the FIPRESCI juries in Berlin in 2015 and Venice in 2017. He has conducted a number of workshops for young or emerging critics around Europe since 2013.

Up to six GoCritic! participants will be invited to Žilina from 27 June-2 July, providing them with an opportunity to join the Student Forum, where selected European animation schools will showcase their films, explain their approaches to teaching animation, discuss distribution and collaborations, and present lectures delivered by a variety of professionals.

Their stories will once again be published on the Cineuropa and Zippy Frames websites.

Please click here to access the call for participants. The deadline is set for 12 May 2023. For more information and any questions, please contact gocritic@cineuropa.org.

This workshop sees GoCritic! continuing its partnership with the Animation Festival Network (AFN), which is co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe – MEDIA programme.