Critics Campus: Where Are They Now? (Part 5)
In the fifth instalment of a series in which we shine a spotlight on Critics Campus’s illustrious alumni, we speak to Michelle Wang (2020 cohort), Charles Carrall (2023 cohort) and Indigo Bailey (2023 cohort) about where their professional paths have led since their participation in MIFF’s incubator program for emerging critics.
Michelle Wang
Since your time as a Critics Campus mentee in 2020, where has your career taken you?
I retained my sanity while moonlighting as a lawyer through venturing into the world of freelance writing, as I started to do more film reviews (and ran around to the odd film premiere when I was working from home). I soon moved into the arts sector full time as an art consultant working on public and commercial art projects. Around the same time, I joined the board of Firstdraft, an artist-run organisation, partly as a way of surrounding myself with more aspirational peers, mentors and contemporaries, inspired by Critics Campus.
I’m now based in London completing an MA in History of Art while continuing to work on independent art projects and writing across a range of publications. My writing has appeared in outlets including The Saturday Paper, Art Guide Australia, ArtAsiaPacific, ELLE Australia and Guardian Australia, among others.
How did Critics Campus help you on this journey?
Critics Campus made me alive to the fact that, yes, writing can be done for a living, and that I could be someone who did this. Being part of the program made it tangible, not just something abstract and that other people did.
Mentors are truly a gift at any stage in life, and Critics Campus provided many. It was so insane to be in the same room with incredibly smart, witty and talented writers giving us their undivided attention, like Philippa Hawker, Anwen Crawford, Shaad D'Souza, Justin Chang and many more. It gave me the confidence to start pitching to publications and, more generally, a kind of gusto for cold reach-outs and putting ideas forward – something that’s stayed with me across several career shifts.
The cohort was just as important: some seriously funny and clever people, who I finally met after lockdowns on a sweaty pub afternoon along with a few other Critics Campus alumni. It’s honestly been so cool to bear witness to everyone thriving! I can’t deny that the Kool Aid is very strong and will change your life. There’s Something About MIFF Critics Campus …
Charles Carrall
Since your time as a Critics Campus mentee in 2023, where has your career taken you?
Looking at the last three years, it’s impossible not to trace everything back to Critics Campus and ‘My Week with Michael Sun’. In 2023, I was working my first full-time job at NIDA in Sydney, having recently moved back from my years living abroad. I had a profound love of moviegoing and big aspirations of writing about film. When at last Critics Campus was brought to my attention by a friend, I put together an application of entirely new writing that I was very serious about (so serious that it included an essay on Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale).
Fast-forward a few years and I now work at Sydney Film Festival alongside Critics Campus all-stars Jessica Moraza and Dominic Ellis (as well as my favourite writer, Keva York, for last year’s edition). After having joined as Festival Administrator, I have since moved into the programming team as Program Manager. Outside of my cinephile day job, I have spent my spare time writing and doing interviews for The Guardian, Screen Slate and The Film Stage. Most recently, I contributed film notes for the 2026 program of Cinema Reborn.
How did Critics Campus help you on this journey?
I am indebted to Critics Campus for the matchmaking service it provides. After being paired with Michael Sun as my mentor in 2023, he and I were helpless but to become good friends. I’d say in some ways he’s the most mature person I’ve ever met, and in other ways he has not yet been born. In the years since Critics Campus, Michael has commissioned and edited plenty of my writing for The Guardian. More recently, he has encouraged me to review things that are not films.
While it was a great privilege to spend a week with a selection of working critics like Michael and Keva, the experience was made all the richer by spending time with other ambitious writers. It was during Critics Campus in 2023 that fellow mentee Indigo Bailey first fantasised about exhuming online film journal Rough Cut. Well before I was ready to call myself a film critic or programmer, I took great pride in contributing to this great place of writing in collaboration with friends I met and made during my Critics Campus week.
Indigo Bailey
Since your time as a Critics Campus mentee in 2023, where has your career taken you?
When I applied for Critics Campus in 2023, film criticism was more of a private fetish for me than a career pathway or even a hobby. I kept diaries in which the entries usually devolved into ramblings about movies. I didn’t have any ‘training’ as a critic. Since – and because of – Critics Campus, I’ve edited a film criticism publication called Rough Cut with my talented friend Tiia Kelly, for which we’ve worked with emerging and experienced writers alike to publish pieces of honest, stylish and unique writing on film which otherwise might not find a home in a sadly scarce, marketing-driven publishing landscape.
Through Rough Cut, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing interviews with master filmmakers like Bertrand Bonello, Mike Leigh, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Azza El-Hassan and Laura Citarella; of championing underground cinema and the art of film programming; and of growing relationships with great local organisations like the Melbourne Cinémathèque and Static Vision. After Critics Campus, I’ve also become much more confident in my voice as a writer. As well as publishing reviews, essays and interviews in outlets like Kill Your Darlings, The Guardian and Senses of Cinema, I also write fiction, and I see this practice as being very intertwined with my film writing – not only because my fiction is often inspired by histories of cinema, performance and celebrity, but because I’m interested in finding cinematic ways of writing.
How did Critics Campus help you on this journey?
Critics Campus was fundamental! Prior to it, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who identified as a critic. I was fascinated by criticism, but couldn’t imagine how it really functioned. I grew up in Tasmania, which is an amazing place but does not have Melbourne’s share of cinemas and cinephilic cultures, and I think that made the idea of being a film critic feel particularly alien to me. Being surrounded for a week by people who believed in its importance sort of rewired my brain and allowed me to stop dismissing it as a pipe dream.
It was a joy to be mentored by Isabella Trimboli, a favourite critic of mine who has a singular voice and a beautiful ability to weave together reflections on multiple artforms; and Critics Campus also introduced me, directly or indirectly, to a lot of other people I now consider mentors in some way. The supportive environment empowered me to do things that terrified me at the time, like write quickly, do my first ever interview and start cold-emailing editors. It was also at Critics Campus that I met Eliza Janssen (one of the founders of Rough Cut, which was then on a hiatus), who basically offered the site to me. I accepted only with coaxing from my fellow mentees, who I’m also still learning from today.