To mark the start of the Ivy Film Festival submission season, organizers of the IFF held an exclusive screening of "Rent," due to be released in theaters nationwide on Nov. 23, at the Cable Car Cinema on Friday.
This year's IFF, which will be held on the weekend of April 7-9, is still in its early planning stages. Every year the IFF consists of three days of screenings, premieres and panel discussions featuring film industry professionals, competitions and workshops, all held at Brown. The IFF is the only entirely student-run film festival in the country and provides an opportunity for student filmmakers to be recognized and learn from one another and offers a venue for networking with industry insiders. Friday's film premiere was followed by a meeting Saturday, held at Leung Gallery, where both festival coordinators and representatives from other Ivy League schools discussed such issues as booking effective spaces for events and potential panel ideas.
Founded in 2001 by Brown alums David Peck '03 and Justin Slotsky '03, the IFF started off as an Ivy League-oriented event. Since then, IFF organizers have discovered that non-Ivy students from all over the country also need a place to showcase their films where they do not have to compete against the well-connected professional filmmakers found at other film festivals. Encouraging a more diverse set of people to submit films has become an important goal of the IFF, and the film competition is now open to student filmmakers from all parts of the globe, with a special category for international films.
Along with the film competition, the IFF includes a screenplay competition for aspiring writers.
The IFF hopes to raise the profile of the screenplay competition. "A lot of people in the industry want to read scripts and talk to the writers," said Rebecca Neipris '06, IFF screenplay competition coordinator. "But in the past, the screenplay competition has suffered most from not having effective publicity."
Measures discussed during the meeting include sending out materials to as many schools as possible, particularly to English departments and renowned writing schools. Organizers hope that digitizing the process will make it easier for all involved parties and increase the number of contributions.
"We're hoping to have a lot of online submissions this year," Neipris said. "People can send hard copies as well if they want to, but I really want to discourage that because last year we had scripts that were falling apart and getting lost."
IFF organizers also feel that in the past the judging process has been unfair. Last year, they selected 50 finalists prior to the festival from a total of over 300 films. However, during the selection process a large number of the submitted films were shown in one long sitting, hurting the chances of films screened toward the end of the viewing. This method also brings the temptation to make judgments on films without watching them in their entirety. One solution discussed at the meeting was breaking up the submissions into smaller groups of films, to be viewed simultaneously by smaller sets of festival coordinators.
"Obviously, there's the problem of consistency," said Bryan Chang '06, program coordinator for the IFF. "But I think that's better than everyone watching just two minutes from each film."
Another issue discussed was raising the glitz level of the IFF. Presenting gilded camera-shaped trophies was one suggestion. In the past IFF organizers have succeeded in attracting a number of celebrities to the Brown campus as keynote speakers, such as Adrien Brody, Oliver Stone, Chloe Sevigny and Tim Robbins.
"Our main goal is to make the Ivy Film Festival bigger and better," said Victoria Hoen '06, an IFF publicity co-coordinator. "We want to increase the audience attracted to the festival and improve the ultimate selection of films this year."
