Unnamed Footage Festival 6(66) - five days!

My friends are back (and this is therefore not a totally objective post) with a new iteration of the Unnamed Footage Festival, a celebration of found footage horror, faux documentaries, narrative films that tell their stories through in-world cameras, and other fascinating narrative/documentary hybrids. 

I noted previously that "more and more movies are being made that confront issues of fantasy and reality in increasingly hybrid and bizarre ways, and UFF continues to cheerfully mutate to embrace them." During a conversation between screenings last year, film programmer Joel Shepard noted that this makes the festival a difficult thing for which to give a simple, elevator pitch, and that's what makes UFF so interesting. And though the designation for this sixth year (UFF 666) is a signal that it is leaning more on the found footage horror sub-genre it was initially largely formed to celebrate, there's still notable and considerable variety in the approaches taken by the filmmakers to make this a more than worthwhile stop for horror fanatics and adventurous filmgoers.

As a preview, I'll go through the five days of UFF666, noting my targets along the way. (Times TBA as of this writing.)

The whole thing kicks off at the Alamo Drafthouse (2550 Mission Street) on Tuesday, March 21, with a prelude screening, if you will, of a 35mm print of Matt Reeves' Cloverfield. One of the more widely-released and seen found footage horror films (and maybe a bit undervalued, thanks to the backlash against its odd viral marketing strategy), the film tells the story of some friends in New York City frantically trying to survive the rampage of a mysterious monster wreaking havoc on the city. It's everything you want in a found footage horror movie, leavened nicely with giant monster carnage, at least one demolished national landmark, and a keenly felt and played romantic subplot. 

UFF666PROPER opens Thursday, March 23 at Artists Television Access (992 Valencia Street). The fest's first feature is Mean Spirited, the first in a string of movies this year in which horrible social media influencers encounter maybe-a-bit-disproportionately-horrible fates. And it's being chased with the second edition of Don't Stop Recording: "This Is Really Happening" Power Hour, a wild and mind-bending collection of the most violent and bizarre moments from favorite and freaky found footage features. You'll want a beer for that one; UFF will provide.

UFF5 offered the theatrical premiere of Robbie Banfitch's far-reaching experimental horror film The Outwaters, and the film went on to become one of 2022's cult favorites. Banfitch cited UFF every chance he got for taking a chance with his film, and on Friday, March 24 he returns to UFF and the Balboa Theatre (3630 Balboa Street), bringing with him a pair of short Outwaters prequels (Card Zero and File VL-624) and his new world premiere, Tinsman Road, which promises a quieter yet engrossing mystery framed as raw miniDV documentary footage.

UFF then jumps to the recently-revamped (and quite lovely) 4 Star Theatre (2200 Clement Street) for a full weekend of screenings March 24 and 25. The final weekend is always a plethora of sensations, and it's well worth parking oneself and just letting the movies happen to one. Saturday/24 you have a pair of short film programs; the Shakespeare-in-Screenlife opus R#J; the politically-charged Lebanese haunted house story What Is Buried Must Remain. Sunday starts strong with the Portrait of Jason-modeled The Gulf of Silence (a feature length interview with fictional UFOlogist Dr. Laura Gale); the day's offerings include 2011 Australian indie sensation The Tunnel (and a new-ish making-of feature, The Tunnel: The Other Side of Darkness) and the Chilean black metal forest horror Invoking Yell.

New festival sponsor Good Vibrations will be on hand to give away a bag of carefully selected toys after Saturday's late show Safe Word, a kinked-up and delightful-looking roman porno from UFF favorite Koji Shiraishi. Similarly spicy is Sunday's marathon-viewing of the Onion's darkly-hilarious, dead-on reality TV spoof Sex House.  And the whole festival ends triumphantly with Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva; the first film in this presumably-ongoing series was one of the most convincing and engrossing faux-docs this writer has ever seen, and director Dutch Marich returns to the Nevada desert to track more mysterious disappearances there, and document the emotional fallout back home.

Marich is but one of many filmmakers who will be present to discuss their work with you. Though I've highlighted the screenings that caught my interest I may well have skipped over what'll turn out to be your favorite UFF offering - the complete schedule, including start times and details on the short films accompanying each screening, can be found at the Unnamed Footage Festival's website. See you in the dark.

Unnamed Footage Festival: Five Films

The Unnamed Footage Festival holds a unique place among indie genre film festivals. It was initially conceived to spotlight new works in found footage horror; the subgenre started (in earnest) with the “rediscovered” film shot by the ill-fated filmmakers of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and that style has been embraced by many low-budget horror films since. But UFF has expanded their scope to include films that embrace some of the storytelling tactics of those films and expand on their strategies to pursue complex narratives and startling emotion. Films shot with the camera taking a single, fixed perspective; fake documentaries; appropriated footage recut into new sequences that suggest new narratives and pose questions about authorship, privacy, and ownership of the image; more and more movies are being made that confront issues of fantasy and reality in increasingly hybrid and bizarre ways, and UFF continues to cheerfully mutate to embrace them.

Full disclosure: the programmers of UFF are all dear friends, and I even introduced a screening at the festival last year. I follow UFF as not just a fan of low-budget horror and other modes of offbeat filmmaking, but as one invested in the work of my friends and enjoying their programming through the perspective of a friend hip to their tastes and processes. So here, to celebrate their third year in operation, to explore some of the things I find notable about their work, and to give others an “in” on what I find distinctive about the programming, are five of the many things I’m excited to check out at UFF.

(I’m going to have to miss both the opening night screening party at Artists’ Television Access, and the next night’s screening of MANIAC at the Little Roxie, so all of the screenings listed below take place at the Balboa Theatre at the dates and times listed. The full schedule for the festival is here.)

SKYMAN – February 29, 2pm
A man who encountered an extraterrestrial as a boy eagerly awaits the alien’s return, and this documentary captures the days leading up to their expected rendez-vous. I’m excited to see a movie so firmly in UFF’s wheelhouse that abandons horror completely, and I’m moved that Daniel Myrick, one of the directors of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, is both sticking to the aesthetic of that monumental film and aiming for something humanistic and transcendent. If you’re completely horror-averse but want to attend and support a scrappy independent genre film festival, this is the one you want to go to.

MURDER DEATH KOREATOWN – February 29, 7pm
A young man disappears during his private investigation of a neighbor’s murder, and the footage he shot documenting the larger conspiracy around the crime is assembled by an unseen but dedicated acquaintance. According to the program this was submitted anonymously. I can’t tell if this is a fake with which my friends are gamely playing along: they haven’t told me and I haven’t asked. I accept and embrace the mystery, and brace myself for wherever this takes us.

THE LOCK-IN – February 29, 11pm
The discovery of a pornographic magazine unleashes unspeakable evil among a group of teenagers during an all-night event at their church. Yes, this is an Evangelical found footage horror movie, and it’s quite unlike any other movie I’ve seen. It has the torpor that comes with many movies made by non-professionals, and is too pious to really deliver the gruesomeness you’d expect in a horror film. And so when it does throw a jump-scare at you, the effect is delightful. I was at the screening where programmer Clark Little sprung it on the rest of the team; this is a movie he champions, out of love for the truly-out-there reaches of no-budget cinema (and a little cultural masochism). I suspect the effects of this at the end of a long day of programming, attended by the inebriation of a late-night screening, will be absolutely mindbending, and that Clark’s intro will be one for the ages.

NOROI: THE CURSE – March 1, 12:05pm
UFF gives over a couple of slots of its final day to a celebration of Japanese auteur Koji Shiraishi. I can’t quite recommend A RECORD OF SWEET MURDER screening later Sunday night, but there’s enough artistry and imagination in that one to make me want to see Shiraishi’s earlier work. This one is notably the longest movie in the festival, taking in an abundance of characters and covering a number of different supernatural and psychological horrors in its documentary shot by a disappeared expert in the paranormal.

FRAUD – March 1, 2:15pm
I don’t understand why I enjoy novella-length movies (50-60 minute running times), but I’m delighted that so many of them pepper the UFF schedule. I’m quite keen on this one, in which filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp turns YouTube home movie clips shot by a suburban family into a 52-minute anti-capitalist odyssey.