Recycled Entertainment

The Found Footage Festival has fun with food

A A A Comments (0) By Mark Dragotta Thursday, Apr 9 2009

Seventeen workplace sexual-harassment videos edited down to three “greatest hits” minutes, a public-access clip of a crazy old man explaining his odd method of saving the world, and a montage of training videos from Wendy’s, Chick-fil-A and a Chicago grocery store. That’s just a taste of what you’ll find at the Found Footage Festival, a celebration of odd, zany and often hilarious videos that are cast away. “The cultural comment is kind of an unintentional byproduct,” says co-curator Nick Prueher. “Basically, we’re doing it because we think it’s funny. Anytime you take videos that were intended to be shown in one respect, like a break room, and put it in a theater with a hundred people — I guess you could call that art. There’s something distinctly American about the disposable, poorly produced creations of people with a lot of ambition and very little talent.”

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This year’s Festival will include a local connection, in the form of contributions from collector/artist/hoarder Andrew Novick (of the Lab at Belmar’s The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick). “We’re on a spring tour, which is taking us to 25 cities over eight weeks,” says Prueher. “We’ve played a lot of places but had never been to Denver until last year, and we instantly fell in love with it and made some great contacts.”

The festival takes place today and tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. at Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli; tickets are $9.50. For more information, call 303-595-3456, ext. 250, or go to www.denverfilm.org.
April 10-11, 8:30 p.m., 2009