In Depth With: Jessica Kiang, Shelly Kraicer, Winnie Wang

10:00 AM, Friday August 16 @ SkyScape Lounge, IMMIX (7 Grosvenor St, Toronto, ON M7A 2G6)

Host: Karen REN, Assistant Programmer, MulanIFF
Language: English

In this fireside chat, three film programmers and writers – Jessica Kiang, Shelly Kraicer, and Winnie Wang – will offer a deep dive into the art of film programming and writing. They will discuss how they curate for festivals, balancing artistic vision with audience appeal. They’ll also touch on how their backgrounds in film criticism and writing inform their programming choices.

Speaker

Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang is a Berlin-based freelance film critic with regular bylines in Variety, Sight & Sound, The Criterion Collection, The New York Times, The LA Times, Film Comment, The Playlist, Rolling Stone, and Mubi. She has served on festival juries from TIFF to IDFA to the BFI London Film Festival and recently became the International Programmer of the Belfast Film Festival.

Shelly Kraicer

Shelly Kraicer is a writer and cinema curator based in Toronto, Canada. Educated at Yale University, he lived for twelve years in Beijing. He has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, the Village Voice, and the New York Times. He has been programmer for Chinese-language films at the Vancouver International Film Festival since 2007, and has been a consultant for the Venice, Udine, Dubai and Rotterdam International Film Festivals. Shelly co-founded Cinema On The Edge in 2015, an organization devoted to promoting and screening independent Chinese films.

Winnie Wang

Winnie Wang is a writer, film programmer and arts administrator based in Toronto. Their writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, Documentary Magazine, Little White Lies and POV. Most recently, Winnie was the industry programmer at Hot Docs and has also held positions at TIFF and CBC. Winnie was the recipient of the International Documentary Association’s 2022 Getting Real Fellowship and the Toronto Film Critics’ Association’s 2023 Emerging Critic Award.

Price

Free with registration. Access included in Filmmaker Pass.

Schedule

10:00 AM – 10:45 AM: Talk with Jessica Kiang, Shelly Kraicer, Winnie Wang
10:45 AM – 11:00 AM: Q&A

Host

Karen REN

Karen Ren is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Her research interests include Taiwanese cinema and media, slow cinema, Queer cinema, documentaries, and youth culture. She aims to examine inter-Asian queer documentaries as a vehicle for critical queer regionalism and queer modernity for her doctoral work. Karen also works for the Hot Docs Documentary Festival and the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival.

Co-Presenter