Found Footage Festival Comes to Art Theatre

A national film festival that’s breathing new life into footage found in dumpsters, at garage sales or thrift stores is coming tonight to Champaign.

Organizers of the Found Footage Festival sift through thousands of hours of clips from home movies to exercise videos, trying to find content that is unintentionally funny. Festival co-founder Nick Prueher said what is featured may not be historically significant, but it is still important.

“Although we certainly don’t have any high flatulent ideas about what we’re doing, there is a value in hanging onto this stuff," Prueher said. "There’s no temperature of controlled vault in the Smithsonian for the Angela Lansbury exercise video for example, but we think it’s worth hanging onto.”

Prueher said each year, he looks for footage from old V-H-S tapes going back to the 1980’s, but this year for the first time he’s including educational videos dating back to the 1950’s.

The festival, which is on a 50-state tour, stops at Champaign’s Art Theatre on Wednesday night at 7:30pm. Tickets are $10