>>PREVIEW
FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL
Saturday, January 20
Engineered Air Theatre (Epcor)
A mix of over-the-top training videos and whatever your neighbour shot on his camera when he thought nobody was looking, the Found Footage Festival features the best of discarded and forgotten videos that thrift shops and yard sales have to offer.
Started in Queens, New York by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, the Found Footage Festival has travelled across North America and as far away as Amsterdam and Paris, showcasing both stupid videos and the pair’s comedic talents.
Prueher, whose resumé includes The Colbert Report, Late Night with David Letterman and The Onion, describes the festival as more of a comedy show than a film screening, in which he and Pickett play the role of tour guides through their collection of absurd found videos.
The videos themselves come from a variety of sources, from Salvation Army stores to estate sales to dumpsters to Pickett’s former job as a video duplicator where he would throw in an extra tape and make a personal copy of anything he found funny.
"As DVD becomes the popular format VHS tapes are showing up more and more in odd places and that’s where we come in," says Prueher.
The seeds of the festival were planted 15 years ago when he found a tape called Inside and Outside Custodial Duties in the break room of the McDonalds he worked at in high school. After commandeering the tape and watching the video featuring an overly perky crew trainer and an extremely dim custodial worker several times, Prueher and Pickett created a kind of running commentary to go with the video as they screened it for friends.
"We thought if there are videos that dumb lying around in break rooms there’s got to be more out there," says Prueher.
After collecting discarded videos for more than a decade and screening larger and larger shows for friends, the pair decided three years ago that they should try it out as a show and they have been running with it ever since.
Pickett found one of the shows most popular clips at a Salvation Army while working on Late Night with David Letterman. A travel video for Rio de Janeiro it stars a very young Arnold Schwarzenegger seductively feeding a woman a carrot, discussing his favourite body parts and according to Prueher, groping every woman that appears in the video.
Though the Schwarzenegger video is a touch racy and part of the thrill of the festival as a whole is the voyeuristic nature of it all, Prueher says that the Found Film Festival is not a source for prurient thrills.
"There’s some non-erotic nudity in there, there’s some full frontal male nudity from a medical video that we found for penal implants," says Prueher. "We also have some exercise videos that get a little sexual in nature and some found home movies that have all sorts of drunken debauchery and nudity on them but if anyone’s turned on by anything in the festival, I think there’s some serious problems."
Other festival hits include a four-minute montage of swear words and temper tantrums featuring the world’s angriest Winnebago salesman and an early tape of the Home Shopping Network in which the obnoxious salesmen’s enthusiasm for hawking their wares borders on the psychotic.
Running as part of the Calgary Underground Film Festival, The Found Footage Festival will screen two completely different shows at 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at the Engineered Air Theatre on Saturday, January 20.
"Normally we’re doing these for late-night audiences but we feel like the Calgary crowd is ready for a three o’clock show," says Prueher." We’re hoping that people will come with an open mind and maybe have an afternoon beer or two while they watch the show." |
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