We need the Found Footage Festival.
The traveling celebration of unvarnished American weirdness, running since 2004, takes compelling strange VHS oddities found in the nooks and crannies of garage sales, thrift stores and the like and showcases them in all of their lo-fi glory.
In an era of manufactured and manicured influencers, with a media landscape undergoing an influx of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI), there is something incredibly compelling about the utter unfiltered, and authentic humanity on display in the Found Footage Festival.
“We post little samples of some of the clips that we play in our live show on our Instagram and YouTube, and the question we keep getting now is ‘Is this AI?’ And I’m like ‘No!’ I hate that we’re to this point,” said festival co-founder Nick Prueher, who began collecting VHS tapes with his childhood friend and Found Footage Festival partner Joe Pickett in 1991.
“I think as things become less real and less tangible, something that’s authentic – even if it’s misguided or poorly produced – there’s even more value to it,” said Prueher. “So even though I hate when people say ‘Is this AI?’ and I have to say ‘No, this is just a weird clip, that stuff existed long before there was the technology to do AI,’ I feel like people appreciate that more.”
The Found Footage Festival is now in its eleventh touring iteration, with a run of East Coast dates that includes a Saturday, March 14 engagement at the ShowRoom Cinema in downtown Asbury Park, New Jersey.
“Just when I think we’ve run out of goofy videos and we’ve found them all, we go through everything we found over the last year and I’m like, ‘Man, we’ve got enough for a new show. We’ve got to show these off,’” said Prueher.
The current show includes not one but two homemade amateur Bigfoot videos, the instructional “Yoga Moves” hosted by 1980s guru Alan Finger and a series of crafting videos hosted by Dian Thomas, of whom Prueher says, “She makes crafts that are outside of the box – a lot of them involve dry ice even when they shouldn’t, weird centerpieces, there’s a dead fish that gets involved in decorating a towel at one point.”
While the Found Footage Festival remains their full-time gig, Prueher and Pickett are staying plenty busy, with the former currently pitching a documentary series on his former place of employment, “The Onion,” and the latter spearheading projects including attempting to get a statue of Mr. T. erected in Chicago, editing pre-show clips for the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain and more.
“We grew up as bored teenagers in a small town in Wisconsin, and so by necessity we had to make our own entertainment,” said Prueher. “So a lot of that was hanging out in thrift stores, doing things to make us and our friends laugh – including getting really dumb driver’s license photos and stuff like shaving our friend’s head in male pattern baldness and entering him for homecoming queen, just goofy things you do when you’re in a small town. We’ve just continued to do that and found a way to make a living doing it.”
