History

The idea of an international student festival in Trondheim came to life in 1988. The thought was to gather students from different parts of the world in a combination of a conference and a festival.

The theme for ISFiT 1990 was A Changing Europe, and the timing couldn’t have been better considering that the Berlin Wall fell shortly before the festival was held. ISFiT arranged for two trains, one from Budapest and one from Paris, to transport 375 students from all over Europe to Trondheim. For many of the participants this was their first visit outside the Iron Curtain, and this train ride has later been called “the ISFiT Rail”.

In 1992 ISFiT had already established its name in the world. More then 4300 applications was addressed to Trondheim from eager students all over the world.

1994 was the year His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited ISFiT. Dedicated ISFiT representatives went to India and spent days outside his office until they got a 10 minutes meeting with him.
–Cancel my other appointments. This is more important, was the response from His Holiness. 1994 was also the year that ISFiT started to give financial support so that participants from even more countries could come to the festival.

The Dialogue Groups was first introduced in 1997, and since then the Dialogue Groups have been a seminar where participants from different side of a conflict get to meet at neutral ground to share their experiences and discuss possible solutions to the conflict.
–If Arafat and Netanyahu had participated in the Dialogue Groups it would not have been a conflict in the Middle East anymore, this was stated by an Israeli participant in 1997.

The Student Peace Prize was introduced in 1999. Since then the prize has been awarded every second year on behalf of all Norwegian students. Antero Benedito da Silva from East Timor was the first laureate, and he got the award for his non-violent battle against the Indonesian occupation.

Today ISFiT is one of the most important meeting places for students from all over the world. In the last years the festival has had participants from more than a hundred countries, and since 2003 more then five Nobel Peace Prize laureates have been at the festival.