Ivy Film Festival with Amanda Tung and Ellie Koschik: Strategy Behind Making Film Accessible
This our third installment of Small Talk with WIB! This time, I interviewed Amanda Tung and Ellie Koschik, who lead the business team of Ivy Film Festival. IFF is the largest student-run film festival in the world, with over 100 members and 10 teams. Their biggest event is their film festival in the spring, where they have short film and screenplay competitions and host industry guests as speakers. IFF also shows movies before their official releases and host workshops with industry professionals. As someone who has frequently attended IFF events, I was excited to chat with Ellie and Amanda about their experiences!
Joining IFF was an obvious choice for both Ellie and Amanda. Ellie remembers seeing a line all the way around the main green when IFF hosted Shia Lebouf and knowing that she wanted to be a part of it. She also spent a summer in Greece looking at documentaries of the refugee crisis, which showed her “how that kind of art form [of film] can construe important things.” For Amanda, IFF was the only group she had heard of prior to coming to Brown, and after fulfilling her creative side with a history major, she knew she wanted to do something more business oriented.
As leaders of the business team at IFF, Amanda and Ellie write budget proposals and organize sponsorship and outreach. They are both adamant that business goes beyond just finance or econ, which is what most people think of as stereotypically “business.” As Ellie says, “most things have a business side.” At IFF, that business side is focused on pursuing the organization’s purpose, which is as Amanda tells me “how do we strategize best to make film accessible for everyone.” To have success in the business field, Amanda points out that you need to have confidence and a certain kind of mentality beyond just hard skills. Additionally, as much of business (both at IFF and in real world jobs) is about talking to people and making compromises, “having EQ [emotional intelligence] is just as if not more important than IQ,” notes Amanda.
Amanda goes on to discuss how she never considered business as a possible career path when she was younger. She reflects on her mindset, which was “everything with business was male-dominated so I’m not even going to look into that.” She regrets that now, wishing she had been more open to pursuing business jobs earlier, as she wants to go into business or marketing fields after Brown.
Ellie agrees, encouraging women in business fields to share their ideas as well as being open to constructive criticism in order to continue to grow. At a summer internship, Ellie found herself presenting a planning study she’d conducted to a group of older, white men, and she says she wouldn’t have had the confidence to present if she hadn’t had mentors at the internship who believed in her. She also describes how she wants to go into real estate after Brown, but has heard from people that “it’s a man’s world” and that they treat women differently. She finds it “intimidating” to hear that, but doesn’t know if she should believe what she hears. As Ellie says, as a woman in a business job, “it’s very important to be confident in yourself.”