The Ivy Film Festival is the world's 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, with collaboration from students of the other seven Ivy League schools. The founders' goal was to create a venue, run entirely by students, to showcase the efforts of fellow student filmmakers.
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 have included Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, Adrien Brody, Aaron Sorkin, James Franco, 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 (500) Days of Summer, Star Trek, Mean Girls, The Believer, Brick, Shine a Light, The Aristocrats and the Academy Award winning and nominated No Country for Old Men, Super Size Me, Half Nelson, Murderball, Water and Iraq in Fragments.
The Ivy Film Festival now accepts submissions from around the world for its 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. It held the distinction of being the first student film festival to have a machinima genre. The 2008 festival featured a keynote address by Fox Filmed Entertainment Co-Chairman and CEO, Tom Rothman, and a master class by Martin Scorsese.
The 2009 Film Festival occurred on April 21-26th, its keynote panel featuring legendary actor Jack Nicholson, Chinatown producer Robert Evans, and Paramount Chairman and CEO Brad Grey, moderated by former Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart.
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