EIFF Projects
EIFF Projects
EIFF Critical Writing Commissions 2023
Edinburgh International Film Festival's Critical Writing Commissions invites nine Scottish or Scotland-based cultural critics, reviewers, and writers to respond to this year's festival programme and the provocation 'cinema and metamorphosis'. This bold and eclectic collection of essays will find expansive ways to offer a perspective of film culture from Scotland to cinephiles, readers, and art lovers around the world.
Project Manager: Tomiwa Folorunso
Editor: Michael Pattison
Writers
Eilidh Akilade
Eilidh Akilade
EilidhAkilade is a writer based in Glasgow. She is currently Intersections Editor at The Skinny and her writing can be found in publications such as Extra Teeth, gal-dem, Dazed, and Fringe of Colour Responses, amongst others.
Caitlin Merrett King
Caitlin Merrett King is a writer and programmer based in Glasgow. She has published writing with Sticky Fingers, MAP Magazine, Nothing Personal and Pilot Press. Her debut novella Always Open, Always Closed was published by JOAN earlier this year.
Kate Morgan
Kate Morgan
Kate Morgan (they/them) is a writer and artist based in Glasgow. They have written for Sticky Fingers, Nothing Personal, MAP Magazine, Design Exhibition Scotland and Worms. Their book, Ingress, a suite of linked essays, was released in 2023 with Pilot Press. They also co-run Fortified Journal with Sinae Park.
Anahit Behrooz
Anahit Behrooz
Anahit Behrooz is a writer, editor and critic based in Edinburgh. She is the author of BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship and works as Books Editor and Events Editor at The Skinny. Her writing has appeared in AnOther Magazine, Little White Lies, gal-dem, and The Big Issue among others.
Jessica Widner
Jessica Widner
Jessica Widner is a writer and academic. She has a PhD in English Literature and an MSC in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh, as well as a BA in English Literature from The University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis, Dream, Fantasy, and Illness: Exploring the Carnal Imaginary; considered psychoanalytic theory, carnal hermeneutics and phenomenology in modern and contemporary women's writing. Her debut novel, Interiors, was released in October 2022 by the87press. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review. She was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence for Open Book Reading.
Katie Goh by Alice Meikle
Katie Goh
Katie Goh is a writer and editor, whose criticism, features and reporting on the arts has been published in The Guardian, Vice, Prospect, i-D, Dazed, Empire, the Independent and others. Katie is the nonfiction editor for Extra Teeth and has previously been an editor for gal-dem and The Skinny. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Anne Brown Essay Prize, the Kavya Prize and a PPA Scotland award, and she was invited to join the UK Critics Circle in 2021. Katie's essay The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was published by 404 Ink in 2021, and her debut book of nonfiction Foreign Fruit will be published by Canongate in 2025.
Harvey Dimond
Harvey Dimond
Harvey Dimond is a British-Barbadian writer, artist and curator based between Scotland and South Africa. Their practices explore the entangled histories and trajectories of (neo)colonialism and the climate crisis.
Xuanlin Tham
Xuanlin Tham
Xuanlin Tham is a writer and film programmer based in Edinburgh. They programme for the UK's leading global action cinema project, Take One Action Film Festival, and their writing has been published in British GQ, The Skinny, i-D, Little White Lies, AnOther Magazine, W Magazine, and gal–dem, among others. They were a finalist for PPA Scotland's Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2022.
Zebib Z K Abraham
Zebib Z. K. Abraham
Zebib K. Abraham (she/her) is a writer and psychiatrist. She completed a Master’s in Creative Writing with distinction from the University of Edinburgh. She has been published in FANTASY Magazine, The Rumpus, Chestnut Review, Barren Magazine, Podcastle, Apparition Lit, and more. She has written film criticism for Spectrum Culture, run mental health workshops for creatives, and been commissioned for storytelling performances.
She is currently querying her second novel and writing a third.
She can be found on Twitter @pegasusunder1, Bluesky @pegasusunder and zkabraham.com
Advisors
Jessica Kiang
Jessica Kiang
Jessica Kiang is a Dublin-born, Berlin-based freelance film critic with regular bylines in Variety, Sight & Sound, The Criterion Collection, The New York Times, The LA Times, Film Comment, MUBI, The Playlist, Rolling Stone, etc. She has served on numerous festival juries, including Toronto, London and IDFA and has frequently led or been a panellist on emerging critics' programmes, including twice being a mentor on the Melbourne Film Festival Critics Campus. In 2022 she made her first foray into programming and is now the International Programmer of the Belfast Film Festival.
Chloe Lizotte
Chloe Lizotte
Chloe Lizotte is the managing editor of MUBI's online publication Notebook. Her writing on film, new media, and comedy has been featured in Reverse Shot, Vulture, Cinema Scope, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Screen Slate, among other outlets. She also writes Reverse Shot's Event Horizon column, surveying non-traditional media across the online landscape—and beyond. Previously, she was a contributing editor at Le Cinéma Club. She lives in Brooklyn.
Dessane Lopez Cassell
Dessane Lopez Cassell is a New York-based editor, writer, and curator. She gravitates towards moving image and visual art concerned with race, gender, decoloniality, and the politics of paradise, with a particular interest in voices from the African and Caribbean diasporas. As Editor-in-Chief of BlackStar’s journal, Seen, Cassell platforms film, art, and visual culture writing by and about people of colour, carving out more opportunities for nuanced, slow journalism.