David Heslin

Age: 26

Twitter handle: @Furbicide

City I call home: Melbourne

Genre/style/region of cinema I am most passionate about: I love films that are formally ambitious and/or intellectually engaging in some way, particularly the films of that kind that were being made in Europe in the 1970s.

A film that changed me/my mind is: Chantal Akerman's News from Home, because it demonstrated to me that you can make a beautiful work of art with nothing more than one person and a camera.

MIFF 2015 film I’m most looking forward to: The Forbidden Room. It just looks fantastically weird.

I’m looking forward to Critics Campus because: It's a great opportunity to learn about the art of film criticism and put it into practice.

Cinema excites me because: There's no art form that gets closer to replicating the human experience.

Favourite Critic and why: Anthony Carew, because it is a foolish person who ventures into a film festival without his guidance. Also, he makes bad films fun to read about.

A publication I’d one day like to write for: Cahiers du Cinéma. No explanation required. It might help if I learned French, though!

What listicle about MIFF would be most likely to go viral? A pictorial history of the theatres of the Melbourne International Film Festival. With cat gifs.