Andrew Heskins

Andrew Heskins (born 1972) is a British film critic. He founded the film website easternKicks in 2002 and co-founded the Focus Hong Kong film festival in 2023.

Andrew Heskins
Born	1972 (age 52–53)
Occupation	Film critic

Biography

Heskins was born in 1972.^[1] He was introduced to Asian cinema when he watched the Monkey TV series in the late 1970s.^[2] During the 1980s and 1990s, his interest in Asian cinema started after watching Japanese television drama and Hong Kong Shaw Brothers movies on TV.^[2][3] In the mid-1990s, he worked as a graphic designer for the Loss Prevention Council and became an art director at Wardour, where he worked on magazines and newsletters.^[4] In 2002, he started easternKicks, a website about Asian cinema with news, reviews, and interviews.^[3][4] He also wrote for the Japanese film magazine Cut.^[5] In 2012, easternKicks had grown with seven regular contributors, and Heskins kept working on it full-time while also doing freelance graphic design.^[2] He got involved with the Chinese Visual Festival to promote Asian films^[3] and has been interviewed by the BBC and The Spectator as an Asian film expert.^[6][7] His reviews have also been quoted in Film International.^[8] He also did commentaries for the movies The Champions and Black Mask and appeared in the Blu-ray re-releases of those films.^[9][10] In 2023, he co-founded the Focus Hong Kong Film Festival with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London.^[11][12]

Personal life

Heskins lives in London with his wife.^[1] Besides movies, he is also a vinyl record collector, which was influenced by his parents. He got into acid jazz in the 1990s and started collecting records, eventually owning over 8,000 with a value of around $39,000 by 2015.^[1]