The Found Footage Festival might just be the weirdest, funniest film festival you’ve never heard of.
The festival, curated by Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, features clips found in thrift stores, garage sales and Dumpsters. What the festival isn’t: a greatest-hits of YouTube virals. Prueher and Pickett are picky about their finds, and they demand physical copies of everything they showcase — and most of the time, their gold comes via VHS.
We spoke with Prueher about his job, his festival and his submission process as he brings his event to Denver and Greeley this weekend.
Q: The title curator sounds like a really fun job in this context. Tell us about the process of curating such a festival.
A: It is a lot of fun digging around in thrift stores and garbage cans, getting our hands dirty in search of VHS gold. But I’m not going to lie, it can also be pretty grueling.
After we’ve gathered a ton of videos throughout the year, we lock ourselves in an apartment, hold hands and try to get through as many tapes as we can without fast-forwarding. I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody to have to sit through the type of dreck we have to, but we’re masochists of sorts. We’ve built up a pretty high tolerance for (bad videos) and, after a while, we start to enjoy subjecting ourselves to it.
Q: You say that none of your work is done online, that it has to be found on physical format. That makes your job more difficult, and it limits what you find.
A: We started finding and collecting videos in 1991, pre-Internet, so it just feels like cheating to us to cull videos from YouTube. Besides, we like to have a personal connection to the footage and share the stories of how and where we found it. Sometimes those stories are as interesting, if not more, than what’s on the tapes. It does make it difficult at times, but it also means that most of the stuff you see at the Found Footage Festival is footage you can’t see anywhere else.
Q: It seems like you and Joe have an unusual love of VHS. Tell us about that.
A: Well, we grew up with VHS, so we have a special affinity for the format in all its clunky, analog glory. In the ’80s and ’90s, the home video market was saturated with VCRs and the VHS format became so cheap and easy to produce that you got all these weird and esoteric things on VHS. I mean, if you bought a bag of cat food in 1990 it came with a VHS tape on how to care for your cat. It was so accessible and disposable that people who had no business behind the camera or in front of it committed all sorts of things to videotape. It’s the same reason why record collectors are constantly digging through bargain bins for undiscovered vinyl: You just never know what’s going to turn up.
Q: A McDonald’s training video first planted the idea for the festival, I’ve read. What was it about that video in particular that made you think, “Wow, other people need to see this”?
A: This training video was for McDonald’s custodians, which was inherently funny because I wasn’t aware that McDonald’s had custodians, and I worked there! But more than anything else, it was the cutesy plot that they tried to force down your throat about how this eager young janitor could hope to one day see “McDonald’s Clean.” As if it wasn’t insulting enough to be working as a McDonald’s custodian, they made you sit through this crap in a smoky break room on your first day. The world needed to see the truth.
Q: I actually have a great VHS I’d love to send you all. I found it in a Perkins restaurant eight years ago in south Denver, and I’ve watched it many times over the years, but it needs to be shared. You all take submissions — tell me about that process. Do you get packages from all over the place?
A: Oh, man, it makes our day whenever someone sends us a tape or brings it to a show. That’s really how we keep the Found Footage Festival going. Joe and I can only find so much ourselves, so we love it when people share their footage and tell us the story of how it was found. If anyone’s found anything at a thrift store or on local public access in the Denver area, please contact us via our website () or bring it to one of the shows this weekend. We’ll give it a good home.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com; Twitter @RVRB
Found Footage Festival
The festival plays at 8:30 p.m. today and Saturday at the Starz FilmCenter, and 7 p.m. Sunday at Greeley’s Kress Cinema. Information:
