New Ivy League Film Festival

This year there is a new film festival geared especially, but not exclusively, for students of Ivy League schools. Fittingly, it is called the Ivy Film Festival. The brainchild of David Peck, a junior at Brown, the festival has already achieved great esteem due to the participation of such celebrity panelists and guest speakers as writer/director James Toback ’66 (Black & White, Bugsy and Harvard Man), producer Barbara Boyle (Bottle Rocket, Phenomenon and Instinct), actor/director Tim Blake Nelson (O, The Grey Zone and O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and the possibility of other notable personalities yet to be named. In addition to judging the submissions, these guest panelists will hold question and answer sessions with the participants, an invaluable opportunity for anyone interested in pursuing a life in the film industry. The festival is sponsored by the Brown Film Society, the Brown Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Student Activities Office, with additional support from Cornell and Yale. It is set to take place at Brown University on Dec. 1 and the deadline for submissions is Nov. 7.

The purpose of this festival is two-fold: to display the depth and breadth of talent in the Ivy Leagues to the outside world and to display to the Ivy League the merit of those among us who concentrate in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES). Although Ivy League schools are often recognized for academic excellence, there is a strong artistic side to these colleges that frequently goes unnoticed. The goal of the festival is to display that there is more to Ivy League students than the stereotype of high SAT scores and straight As on high school report cards. As Peck said, “Everyone knows about USC and NYU, but no one thinks of the Ivies when it comes to film…even at Brown, the film students generally go unrecognized.” In the Ivy League schools, the VES students often do not receive the respect they deserve from their peers. Producing a complex and interesting piece of artwork, such as a feature length, or even short, film, is an exceedingly difficult and time-consuming operation. VES classes can take up as much as eight hours a week of class time, which does not include the massive amount of time spent working outside of class on projects. It is a remarkably demanding process.

The idea for the festival arose due to Peck’s exposure to another Ivy League institution; the Ivy Council. As a former member, Peck saw the collaboration of all these schools as an incredible opportunity to foster creativity among Ivy League students gone to waste. Now, disillusioned with the Council, Peck has taken the initiative himself to make this festival happen. Working over the summer with the aid of fellow Brown students Justin Slosky and Seth Pipkin, along with Harvard student Kyle A. Gilmore ’02, Peck organized the entire festival, securing the guest speakers and panelists and negotiating with the Brown Student Activities Office.

Although the festival is named the Ivy Film Festival, it is not restricted solely to Ivy League students. Originally, building off of the inspirational idea of the Ivy Counsel, Peck intended to make the festival Ivy League only, wanting to use it as a means to unify the Ivies. However, fearful of falling into the stereotype of the Ivies being elitist and exclusive, he opened the festival to all colleges nationwide, but kept the name as it was in order to maintain that the focus is still on the Ivies and in order to attract more press. In addition to avoiding the scorn of non-Ivy League schools, the quality of the festival as a whole increases by allowing students from non-Ivies to submit their work because it raises the level of competition and leads to the promotion and celebration of more qualified work.

As well as screening the participants’ films, the festival will include a screening of Demian, a film co-written and co-produced by Peck, and directed by Tim Henry, another Brown student, and the sneak preview of Harvard Man, a Lion’s Gate Films production directed by James Toback, one of the celebrity panelists. This film, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Adrian Grenier and Joey Lauren Adams, is about the dark side of college sports and relationships as discovered by the point guard of the Harvard basketball team, Grenier, who maintains relationships with both Gellar, who plays a student at Boston College whose father is a mob boss, and his Philosophy professor, played by Joey Lauren Adams. Since the movie is set to premiere in March of this coming year, the Ivy Film Festival is a great opportunity to have an advance viewing of this upcoming blockbuster.

We can expect a strong showing from Harvard at the festival, with Randy Bell, a former student and current VES teaching fellow, submitting his film Look Back, Don’t Look Back, which won Best of the Festival at the New England Film and Video Festival and Kyle Gilmore, a current VES concentrator, submitting his film Cameranoise.

Peck, a Los Angeles native who has an interest in film and screenwriting all his life, hopes for this festival to become a long-lived institution among the Ivy League schools. Pending this year’s success, he intends to organize the festival as an annual event on an eight year rotating schedule in which each Ivy takes a turn at hosting it. Such a tradition would enrich the artistic culture of the Ivy League schools. Simply put, it would be a lot of fun.