The Ivy Film Festival encourages the creative efforts of undergraduate filmmakers by acting as a quality venue for their work and by creating opportunities for these filmmakers to learn from one another and from talented professionals. The festival strives to garner recognition for student filmmakers by means of a panel of celebrity judges including: directors, producers, writers, and agents who will view the top films from the festival.
As the fastest-growing student film festival on the East Cost, the Ivy Film Festival serves as a rare and invaluable forum for interaction between student filmmakers and professionals in the film industry. Founded in 2001 by Brown graduates David Peck (’03) and Justin Slosky (’03), the Ivy Film Festival is the largest entirely student run film festival in the United States, and continues to attract submissions from a broader range of national and international student filmmakers and screenwriters every year.
In 2006, the festival received over 300 film submissions and 100 screenplay submissions, out of which an Official Selection of 36 films and 5 screenplays were selected for judging. The Official Selection is screened over the course of the festival weekend, and the winners are picked by industry professionals and Hollywood celebrities in attendance and announced at the awards ceremony; past judges have included Oliver Stone, Adrien Brody, Wes Craven, Tim Robbins and Michael Showalter.
Each year, awards are sponsored by major corporations, offering prizes to winners to aid them in their continuous pursuit of the filmmaking dream. In 2006, the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards were sponsored by Open Student Television Network (OSTN), which provided the winners of the respective awards with a new Canon GL2 digital video camera and a new Apple laptop.