Workshop of Film Criticism 2024
The Workshop of Film Criticism will take place from April 16th - April 20th 2024.
A festival like LICHTER is a special challenge for film critics: Here, films are shown in close succession, one can compare better than usual and reflect on the situation of cinema as a whole. Often there is little time to reflect on what has been seen between screenings - or even to write a text.
The workshop Film Criticism enables first steps on this path. Together with film critics Bert Rebhandl and Carolin Weidner, participants learn the basic craft of film criticism and try it out with their own texts, which will appear daily on the LICHTER Filmfest critics' blog.
The Film Criticism Workshop takes the film visit at the 17th LICHTER Filmfest as a basis for joint reflections: What can film criticism be today? What is a good text? How do you write professionally and originally - and under time pressure? In a practical and in-depth way, this will also be about the craft and the intellectual foundations of film criticism. And also about the question of whether other forms of publication, for example via podcasts, can be an adequate complement to traditional media.
The Film Criticism Workshop will be held April 16-20, 2024, as a face-to-face event.
The project takes place in cooperation with the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies (TFM) of the Goethe University, the Hessian Film and Media Academy (hFMA) and the LICHTER Film Festival.
An impression of the reviews from the last years can be found on the critics blog and on Letterboxd.
Participants of the workshop will receive festival passes and thus free entry to almost all LICHTER events.
Conditions of participation and application documents
The workshop is a free offer for students and (fresh) alumni from the hFMA network. An overview of all 13 participating universities can be found here.
We are happy to extend the workshop to interested parties from outside the network! You can participate with a fee of 150,- € if places are available.
Students of the TFM (Theater-Film- und Medienwissenschaften) of the Goethe University will receive 2 CPs for participation.
Application materials:
- Film review of a film of your choice that was screened in 2023 or 2024 (1200 characters incl. spaces!)
- confirmation of your full-time attendance on all workshop days from April 16th - April 20th 2024 in Frankfurt
- please state your university, your course of studies and your semester (or your degree if your are an alumni)
Please send your application via this form. The deadline for the application is April 7th, 2024.
Please send any questions, which might occur to info@hfmakademie.de.
Workshop Directors
Bert Rebhandl
The Austrian journalist has made a name for himself as a film critic. He sees cinema as an observational space: "The film I've seen is a unit and an excerpt. That's how the interest starts in writing. I look for films that produce a surplus in which I can inscribe myself." He writes for the FAZ, the taz and Cargo, among others, and teaches part-time at the FU Berlin.
Carolin Weidner
Carolin Weidner (*1989) studied film studies and journalism and communication science in Berlin. Parallel to her studies, she began writing film texts for magazines such as tip Berlin and kulturSPIEGEL as well as for the daily newspapers taz and FAZ. She currently works as a freelance writer for taz and SPIEGEL Online. For several years, she has also volunteered on the board of the Association of German Film Critics. She teaches film journalism at the University of Hildesheim.
