MWFF Critics Lab 2022: Meet the Mentees
Each year, the MWFF team selects a small group of emerging critics to participate in the Critics Lab. This year we are celebrating five years of Critics Lab, so we’ve selected five fresh faces to join our program!
Throughout the festival, the folks in the Lab will be writing updates in our festival diary, interviewing filmmakers and panellists, reviewing the incredible films in the program and deciding the winner of our annual Critics’ Choice Award. To make things even more exciting, we’re teaming up with Kill Your Darlings to publish their work after we wrap up the festival!
Keep an eye out for these legends around the festival and online!
Victoria Lonergan is a recent Media Communications and Film Studies graduate from the University of Sydney. As an aspiring writer and filmmaker, she is passionate about providing audiences with opportunities to connect to stories of those that often go untold, including diverse and marginalised voices.
Taylor Mitchell writes essays and fiction. She is also the arts program manager at the Environmental Film Festival Australia. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
Paul Burns is an emerging filmmaker and aspiring critic, who has a lifelong fascination with the history of cinema and storytelling traditions. Paul is currently in their final year of the Bachelor of Film and Television with Honours in Writing and Directing, at Swinburne University of Technology. Paul's graduate film 'Get to the Wire’ explores detention centre systems and some of the psychological impacts on detained people within those systems. Paul is inspired by filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Zuławski, Claire Denis & Tsai Ming-liang, and is always excited by opportunities to dive further into cinema, filmmaking and critical theory.
Lily Rodgers is an aspiring critic and filmmaker who is passionate about stories that explore marginalised experiences. She is currently a student of politics and film at the University of Sydney and is about to commence her honours in Film Studies, specialising in the fields of feminist film criticism and coming of age cinema.
Isabel Donohoe is a freelance writer based in Adelaide. “My most natural forms of expression have always been writing and dancing. I crave both; words and action. It’s how I translate the world around me, and rejuvenate the one within me. “