Ivy Film Festival

The Ivy Film Festival is the largest, entirely student-run film festival held annually on the campus of Brown University. The festival was started in 2001 by Brown juniors David Peck and Justin Slosky and students from the other seven Ivy league schools. The founders' goal was to create a venue to showcase the efforts of fellow student filmmakers. The event is run entirely by students, and with its continual growth has become one of the largest student film festivals in the US.

The festival often attracts major talent and celebrities that attend the festival to engage in a discussion about all aspects of film. Some topics in the past have included: the relationship between film and social justice, breaking into the film industry, and the merits of attending film school. Notable appearances at the Ivy Film Festival include Tim Robbins, Oliver Stone, Adrien Brody, Wes Craven, Philip Glass, Dylan Kidd, James Toback, John Hamburg, Julia Stiles and Michael Showalter. In addition to student film screenings, the Festival is also host to advance screenings of popular and critically-acclaimed films, often with the filmmakers present for discussions. Preview festival screenings have included the films "Mean Girls", "The Believer", "Brick", "The Aristocrats" and the Academy Award-nominated "Super Size Me", "Half Nelson", "Murderball", "Water", "No Country for Old Men", and "Iraq in Fragments".

The Ivy Film Festival now accepts submissions from around the world for their film and screenplay competitions.

The 2007 festival included pre-release screenings of Sundance Film Festival selections, panels and workshops with award-winning filmmakers, and presentations by Doug Liman, director of "The Bourne Identity" and Chan-wook Park, director of "Oldboy". Other guests included actor John Cho and Academy Award-winning writer/director Sarah Kernochan.

The 2008 Film Festival occurred on April 14-20th at Brown University. It held the distinction of being the first student film festival to have a machinima genre. The 2008 festival featured a master class by Martin Scorsese.

External links

* [http://www.ivyfilmfestival.com Official Site]