An international selection of celebrity guests and student filmmakers will descend on campus this week for the sixth Ivy Film Festival, which will feature events from today through Sunday.
A highlight of the festival will be the Saturday keynote address by director Doug Liman '88 and screenwriter Simon Kinberg '95 about their new projects and the Hollywood filmmaking process. Liman was the director of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "The Bourne Identity." Kinberg wrote "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," as well as "X-Men: The Last Stand."
The festival, which was started by David Peck '03 and is now held annually at Brown, continues to grow significantly every year in terms of the number of submissions and their quality, said Nick Clifford '08, co-executive director of the festival.
A screening of "Lady Vengeance" on the Main Green Wednesday night will precede director Chan-wook Park's discussion of contemporary Korean cinema Friday. "I think our real highlight guest is (Park) ... who is a huge icon in Korean cinema and also very big in Europe," Clifford said, adding that the festival organizers are flying Park in from Korea.
Actor John Cho - best known for his role as Harold in the 2004 comedy "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" - will speak Thursday night about his experiences as a young Korean-American actor in Hollywood.
Though the celebrity actors and filmmakers are certainly an attraction, according to Clifford, "the real purpose of this festival is to reach out to these filmmakers who aren't necessarily film students, who don't go to a film school, but make great work." The Ivy Film Festival answers the need for a film festival that caters specifically to student filmmakers, he said.
The opening night screening of student films in the Official Selection will be shown Friday in Salomon 101, followed by a panel discussion with the student filmmakers. Student films will screen throughout the day on Saturday, broken up into four programs, entitled "Challenge," "Identify," "Love" and "Obsess."
During a programming weekend in February, the festival programmers pared down the roughly 250 submissions to an official selection of 32 student films, Clifford said. Student films are categorized into undergraduate, graduate and international categories, with an emphasis on the undergraduate films, he said, adding that the opening night selection reflects the favorite works of the programmers.
This year's festival features four Brown student films, including the animated feature "Somedays" by Emily Friend Roberts '08, the experimental film "The Listening Project" by Maggie Perkins '08 and two dramas - "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" and "The Red Balloon" - by Joseph Kuhn '07.
Kuhn, whose two films will screen Saturday, said he is excited and honored that both of his submissions made it into the festival. "Cigarettes" is about a boy and a girl obsessed with Rufus Wainwright, while "The Red Balloon" portrays a lonely boy who longs to go to Paris. Both films, made during his time at Brown, "have an obsession with music," he said.
Awards are given for undergraduate comedy, drama, animation, experimental and documentary films, as well as graduate and international films, Clifford said. The festival's winning films will be chosen by a panel of celebrity judges, and awards will be given out to student filmmakers on Saturday night at an Oscar-style awards ceremony sponsored by Current TV, Clifford said.
This year's festival features a significant increase in corporate sponsorship. "Last year, we only had (Open Student Television Network), but this year we have OSTN, Current TV, Variety, MasterCard, Citizens (Bank). ... It's just a very large list," Clifford said.
The increase in corporate sponsorship was necessary due to a decrease in financial support from the University, Clifford said, forcing the festival to reach out to corporate sponsors and outside grants.
"Actually, it works out so much better because not only did the corporate sponsors give us money, but they send us publicity materials, they help us publicize on their Web sites and it really adds to the cache of being a film festival when you have major sponsors," Clifford said.
Festival screenings begin Monday and Tuesday nights with screenings of a selection of documentaries, including Sarah Kernochan's Oscar-winning "Thoth" and Margaret Brown's '94 "Be Here to Love Me," a profile of the life and career of singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. The directors of these films will sit on Saturday's documentary filmmaking panel to discuss their work, Clifford said.
The main events officially start on Wednesday, with an Avon Cinema screening of Sundance Film Festival award-nominee "Eagle vs. Shark," which Clifford describes as a "new, Napoleon Dynamite-style film." A tentative addition to the schedule is a Thursday screening of "The War Tapes" by Deborah Scranton '84, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Clifford said.
A Friday screening of "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" will be introduced by Dito Montiel, who won the 2006 Best Director award at Sundance for the film. A Saturday morning screenwriting panel and a business seminar with the former vice chairman of Paramount, Rob Friedman P'07, are also scheduled. Industry professionals will lead workshops on art direction and editing on Saturday, as well as panel discussions on documentary filmmaking and new media.
The festival will close Sunday with a screening of the 2007 festival's winning student films and a sneak preview of Vanessa Roth's lighthearted documentary, "Third Monday in October," which follows 12 young candidates vying to be president of their middle school student councils against the backdrop of the 2004 presidential race.
