Betsy Isakova
Betsy Isakova is the editor-in-chief of Kinovoice, a film critic and a media manager. She writes about film, series and Moscow theatre: festival and theatrical premieres, Russian series and streaming, stage productions, and the books that screen adaptations grow out of.
She contributes to Kinopoisk (Russia’s largest film database and media), Okko, The Blueprint, RBC Style and Afisha Daily. For Kinopoisk she takes part in the year-end lists of the best films, series and books, covers the line-up of the Pilot series festival and dissects the finales of the season’s major series; for The Blueprint she interviews actors and series creators; for RBC Style she writes for the Visionaries section.
Her second profession is podcasts: for almost three years she produced Kinopoisk’s film podcast Krupnym Planom (“Close-Up”) and she co-authors Kinopoisk podcasts. Her degree thesis dealt with the representation of the urban environment in European auteur cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, a perspective she returns to in her reviews.
She has run the Telegram channel kino_voice since May 2023: new films and series, streaming premieres, classics revisited, photos from film sets and festival notes. Kinovoice grew out of that channel: the long-form texts are now published on this site so that they can be found, quoted and linked to, and selected texts are translated into English.
Where to follow
For festivals, distributors and PR teams — the press page.