Heskins was born in 1972. He was introduced to
Asian cinema when he watched the
Monkey TV series in the late 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, his interest in Asian cinema started after watching
Japanese television drama and
Hong Kong Shaw Brothers movies on TV. 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. In 2002, he started easternKicks, a website about Asian cinema with news, reviews, and interviews. In 2012, easternKicks had grown with seven regular contributors, and Heskins kept working on it full-time while also doing freelance graphic design. His reviews have also been quoted in
Film International. He also did commentaries for the movies
The Champions and
Black Mask and appeared in the
Blu-ray re-releases of those films. In 2023, he co-founded the Focus Hong Kong Film Festival with the
Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London. == Personal life ==